Facing High Legal Fees, Immigrants Are Using Web Tools to Apply for Green Cards Madeleine Wattenbarger - VICE
go to original October 30, 2017

For Victor Murillo, the prospect of returning to the city of his birth is unthinkable.

The 30-year-old came to the United States from Guadalajara, Mexico, when he was two, and doesn't remember his native country at all. But Murillo's status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program protecting undocumented people brought to the United States as kids will expire less than a year from now, in September 2018. And President Trump's recent cancellation of DACA means that Murillo won't be able to renew that protection again - at least not unless Congress takes action.

Losing his DACA status could leave Murillo vulnerable to deportation, and with it, and separation from his wife and kids in California. "I can't even plan ahead past two-year increments because my future is in the hands of a policy change that any president can end," he told me.

Fortunately, unlike many DACA recipients, Murillo is eligible to apply for a green card. But whereas applying for DACA was straightforward and simple - Murillo filled out his application by himself - he realized early on he couldn't afford the thousands of dollars it might cost to retain a lawyer for the green-card process. Even so, Murillo was resigned to going it alone until he heard about a service called Borderwise promising to help.

Borderwise is one of several burgeoning online tools offering assistance to the various communities impacted by Donald Trump's hardcore immigration policies. Others include Clearpath, which also facilitates green card, citizenship, and DACA applications, and Citizenshipworks, a free, nonprofit service that guides users through the naturalization application. Meanwhile, the Immigrant Advocates Network has developed a service called Immi, which screens immigrants through an online survey in order to inform them about options for staying legally in the US.

For its part, Borderwise merges the green-card and naturalization forms into a single question-and-answer interface. After completing the forms, users are connected with an immigration lawyer who goes over the paperwork with them. And while the tech world's often tone-deaf save-the-world idealism doesn't always live up to its lavish promises, tools like this one do seem to be helping fill gaps in the system for immigrants whose presence in the US is increasingly in peril.

Read the rest at VICE

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