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 to protect immigrants living in the U.S. illegally by utilizing high tech and online social communications.

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

Users can prepare a set of automatic messages to alert — with one click — family members, lawyers and others if they, or someone they care about, encounter 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 Apple apps stores.

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Smartphone applications to deal with arrests by immigration agents are evolving in an era of increased enforcement on the southern border, as well as inside the country.

“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 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.”

Being prepared

The app was designed “precisely to have a plan of action at your” fingertips, Reyna said. 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, a recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program along with her two sisters, said 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.

González, who was brought to the U.S. illegally in 1985 when she was 9 years old, said Notifica “will make it easier for my family to contact me in the case, God forbid, something may happen.”

In demand

Supporters of strong anti-illegal immigration policies, however, see initiatives like Notifica 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 Nextdoor.com and other network groups to alert each other.”

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

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 (President Donald Trump’s 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 percent since Trump’s inauguration Jan. 20, 2017, until the end of the fiscal year Sept. 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. The rate of the annual increase, however, was much lower in Houston, with only 5 percent compared to 71 percent in Dallas.

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,” Berger Cardoso said.

Policies such as Texas’ Senate Bill 4 raised concerns among human rights advocates for the potential of 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 UWD’s National Defense Network Program, which has also developed other projects such as the Texas Immigrants’ Rights Hotline, 888-507-2970, which provides information and referrals to legal services in Texas.

Reyna said that UWD is already working on a second version 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.

‘Ways to survive’

A feature in development that Reyna said could be helpful to immigrants is a tool like a heat map that would 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 Hicks 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,” said Zayas, also the author of the book “Forgotten Citizens: Deportation, Children, and the Making of American Exiles and Orphans.”

A similar app in development is RedadAlertas, which seeks to quickly spread immigration-raid alerts that would be verified and distributed using “raid rapid response networks.” It is planned for mid-2018, according to the app’s 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, which could be available this year. Its website says it will provide real-time information about the best immigration routes to cross the U.S.-Mexico Border.