Immigration agents knocking at the door? Now, there’s an app for that, too.

United We Dream, the largest national immigrant youth-led organization, has officially launched a smartphone application that added yet another tool for the protection of undocumented immigrants utilizing high tech and online social communications.

The app, called Notifica, allows undocumented immigrants to activate a plan if they come in contact with immigration law enforcement authorities or find themselves at risk of being detained.

The users can previously prepare a set of automatic messages to alert - with one click - family members, lawyers, and others if they or someone they care about have an encounter with immigration enforcement authorities. The tool was developed last year and distributed on a small scale, and is now available for the public on Google and at Apple apps stores.

Smartphone applications to deal with arrests by immigration agents are evolving in an era of stepped-up enforcement on the southern border, as well as inside that nation.

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“The current sociopolitical context of enforcement has increased fear and anxiety in the immigrant community, regardless of citizenship status,” said Jodi Berger Cardoso, a professor at the University of Houston’s Graduate College of Social Work, who specializes in exposure to trauma and psychosocial stress among related to migrations.

“We have witnessed in Texas and across the United States the increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in local communities, including schools,” she said.

Adrian Reyna, director of Membership and Technology Strategies for United We Dream, said that “when something actually happens, most people don’t know what to do at that moment.”

The app was designed “precisely to have a plan of action at your” fingertips, explained Reyna. Once Notifica is downloaded to a phone, the user can create personalized messages for predetermined family members and others they would want to inform in the event of an encounter with law enforcement.

For example, one message could be forwarded to a lawyer warning about an arrest in progress, or to a family member with instructions to call an advocate from a legal defense group.

Damaris González, who is enrolled in DACA along with her two sisters, says she and her family are installing the app on their phones.

“My mom doesn’t have documents, so I want to make sure that we are prepared and know what to do if something happens,” said González, an organizer with United We Dream.

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González, who was brought to the U.S. illegally in 1985 when she was nine years old, considers that Notifica “will make it easier for my family to contact me in the case, God forbid, something may happen.”

Supporters of strong anti-illegal immigration policies, however, see initiatives like the creation of this app as tools to evade the law.

“I am not surprised by the app,” said Marri Velasquez, a Republican activist from Houston who co-founded the Hispanics for Trump group. “It’s like fugitives, always running around trying to find the new thing… they use Nexdoor.com, and other network groups to alert each other.”

“There is always going to be another protection; another cover-up; but this is not going to change anything,” Velasquez said.

Contemporary tools like Notifica, however, are in demand among immigrant communities, and not only for undocumented residents. United We Dream said that Notifica and the Texas hotline are designed to help immigrant families “under an increasing threat of criminalization as the (Donald) Trump administration carries out its mass detention and deportation agenda.”

Arrests in the interior of the country by ICE, the arm of the Department of Homeland Security in charge of deportations, increased 42% since the inauguration of President Donald Trump on January 20 until the end of the fiscal year on September 30, compared to the same period in 2016, according to Pew Research Center using ICE data.

Houston, with 13,565 arrests, was the city with the second largest number of ICE arrests nationwide following Dallas with 16,520 during the 2017 fiscal year. However, the rate of the annual increase was much lower in Houston, with only 5%, compared to 71% in Dallas.

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Immigrant populations “often experience a sense of powerlessness to protect themselves, and in particular, their children from immigration enforcement tactics, as well as racial and ethnic profiling,” said Berger Cardoso.

Policies such as the Texas SB-4 law raised concerns among human rights advocates for the potential of becoming a tool for racial profiling. It allows police officers to request immigration status documents when they stop people.

Notifica includes information and guidance about the rights of immigrants and tips on what to do in different scenarios. It is an initiative of the UWD’s National Defense Network Program that has also developed other projects such as the Texas Immigrants’ Rights Hot Line [1 (888) 507-2970], which provides information and referrals to legal services in Texas.

Reyna said that UWD is already working on version 2 of Notifica, which will include the ability to use more languages. Currently, it employs Spanish and English but will be upgraded later this summer with language features in Vietnamese, Korean and Chinese. Another feature that will be included is the ability to determine the location of where a person is being held in detention.

A feature now in development that Reyna said could be helpful to immigrants when added to Notifica is a tool like a heat map that could allow people to monitor the level of risk in a specific location at any given time.

“In general terms, we all try to find ways to survive in our life, and this is not different,” said Luis Zayas, dean of the Steve Hick School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Austin.

Under the current “aggressive immigration enforcement … it’s natural for these communities under such scrutiny to use the technology for communication that we have today,” explained Zayas, also the author of the book Forgotten Citizens: Deportation, Children, and the Making of American Exiles and Orphans.

A similar app that is in development now is RedadAlertas, aiming to quickly spread immigration rides alert that would be verified and distributed using “raid rapid response networks.” It is planned for mid-2018, according to the app website. But already in use among immigrant communities are applications like Arrived and Immigo that provide information and services targeted to immigrants.

Perhaps the most notable potential technological breakthrough would be one called Bienvenidos that could be available this year. Its website says that it will provide real-time information about the best immigration routes to cross the U.S.-Mexico Border.

olivia.tallet@chron.com

Twitter: @oliviaptallet