A call for help for an ambitious project
Main goal: crowdfunding to help our community members and make sure everyone is accounted for and represented fairly.
Mission: create a community wide GitHub
Who’s involved?: whoever the fuck wants to be
I think we need to start building community systems ourselves instead of waiting around for institutions and officials to eventually respond while families are stuck dealing with these situations alone.
There is already a massive amount of public immigration court data out there, but most normal people have no idea where to find it, how to understand it, or how to use it to actually help people.
Right now, public databases already track things like:
• Unaccompanied minors released to sponsors by county
• Immigration court backlogs
• Whether people — especially minors — have legal representation or are forced to represent themselves
• Organizations receiving funding for youth legal services
Some of these public sources include:
• ORR / HHS datasets
• TRAC Immigration Data tools (Syracuse University)
• Vera Institute legal representation dashboards
• California CDSS Youth Legal Services directories
What I want to help build is a community-run website that organizes this information into something people can actually use.
A place where families can stay informed.
A place where representation gaps become visible.
A place where the community can help fund legal support.
A place where minors and vulnerable families are less likely to disappear into a system nobody understands.
One of the biggest goals is helping ensure minors are not navigating immigration court alone without fair access to legal representation. If direct tracking information is unavailable for privacy reasons, then we can still organize around the known gaps and create community legal aid and crowdfunding systems to help support them.
Long term, I’d like this to become a larger civic-tech collaboration that Santa Cruz builds together — something open-source, transparent, community-driven, and expandable to other counties facing the same problems.
And to be clear:
You do NOT need to be a professional developer to help.
If you care about helping people and want to contribute, there’s a place for you here.
We need:
• People willing to learn
• Organizers
• Writers and researchers
• People who can help collect and organize public data
• Frontend and backend coders
• Designers
• Anyone interested in transparency, civic-tech, legal access, or community systems
A lot of this can be learned and built collaboratively together.
We can start simple:
• GitHub
• Replit
• Termius
• Supabase
• Open datasets
• Whatever helps us move quickly and organize effectively
I genuinely think Santa Cruz could build something meaningful here that other counties could eventually adopt and improve together.
If you want to help build it, comment or DM me.