This app wants to warn undocumented immigrants of raids in Trump's America

Just 24 days into Donald Trump's presidency, more than 680 undocumented immigrants were forced to leave the country in a series of mass raids. That's an average of about 28 people each day.

Now, 27-year-old web developer and designer Celso Mireles, once an undocumented immigrant himself, is developing an open source app that will show people exactly when and where these raids are happening, as Vice's Motherboardreports.

While still in the development phase, RedadAlertas (or "raid alerts") plans to give verified, secure information about when the government sends in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to round people up.

SEE ALSO:5 crucial online resources that help immigrants learn their rights in airports

The sudden immigration raids under Trump have put undocumented immigrant communities on high alert in major U.S. cities such as Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles and New York. Some of these people have switched up their daily routines to avoid being found, from signing legal documents asking family and friends to pick up their kids from school to carrying around "Know Your Rights" guides in Spanish and English that explain what to do if they're in a raid, Timereports.

RedadAlertas hopes to crowdsource information about immigration raids to help these people. Once it's determined a raid is happening, subscribers are expected to receive an alert about it in real-time, with the app using their geolocation or zip code to tell them about the raid closest to them.

But making that process happen is no easy task. The app faces the threat of anti-immigrant trolls deliberately misleading people with false information. So Mireles has some safeguards he expects will prevent such problems.

In late January, hundreds of undocumented Mexican immigrants met with their relatives along the U.S.-Mexico border in a show of unity to Trump.Credit: ALEJANDO BRINGAS/EPA/REX/Shutterstock

"The process is to crowdsource information [on raids] and verify it," he told Motherboard. "If someone reports a raid, there has to be multiple verifications. Organizers from the immigrant community want to defend against trolls. Then the system will know and send a message to everyone in 10 to 20 mile radius."

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In collecting this information, Mireles has reached out to immigration advocacy groups, computer coders and anyone else who can offer help. He's already attracted the help of techies like Yosem Companys, who worked on Stanford University's "Liberation Tech" efforts using tech to "promote democracy, development, freedom, and human rights around the world."

Mireles expects to have two types of people using the app -- those who subscribe for alerts and those who report and verify raids, as he explained on a FAQ page where people can find information about joining the project. Types of raids include those happening at home, work or at traffic checkpoints. For now, the app is in Spanish and English but Mireles hopes to include other languages as more people join the project.

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The app will be selective with the raids it flags to avoid unnecessary anxiety. "Only work raids and traffic checkpoints will be sent as alerts to people nearby," Mireles wrote on the FAQ page. "This is because there is little value in sending info about a home raid nearby, [which] serves more to spread fear."

Still, there are also concerns about the U.S. government potentially looking to the app's users as a database of the people it plans to deport.

In order to protect the identities of users, Mireles has said the app would require only a phone number and two-step authentication verification. While personal identities can still potentially be tracked by phone number, he hopes this very minimal amount of personal information will keep users' identities safely anonymous.

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Mireles first developed the app during the Obama administration, when the last president deported 3 million undocumented immigrants. In fact, the name of the app used to be Redadas de Obama, or "Obama's Raids." He's now just reviving the project, and bringing it to full scale as the threat of mass deportations under Trump stokes the fears and anxieties of American immigrants nationwide.

Obama's policies targeted immigrants with a record of a felony or serious misdemeanor such as drunk driving or dealing drugs (or three lesser misdemeanors). It also deported people who had come into the country illegally any time after January 1, 2014, as NBC Newsreports. Trump's heavy-handed policy plans go beyond that.

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His executive orders would authorize the arrest and removal of people who are convicted, or even just charged, with a crime. People can also be deported for having "committed a chargeable criminal offense," such as driving without a license or illegal entry.

The crackdown has been met with widespread fear in the communities it targets, such as when a 35-year-old mother named Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos was deported during a routine check-in with ICE. She had used a fake social security number for a job, and was arrested and deported for criminal impersonation -- an event that sent her name trending across Twitter.

"The truth is I was there [in the United States] for my children," she later said at a news conference from Mexico. "For a better future. To work for them. And I don't regret it, because I did it for love."

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TopicsApps & SoftwareSocial GoodDonald TrumpPoliticsImmigration

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