Immigration legal and advocacy groups in the US have had a lot more work to take on since President Donald Trump came back into office. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s social media pages have been repurposed to name and shame undocumented immigrants.
San Francisco-based nonprofit Mobile Pathways is using artificial intelligence to help immigrants get access to reliable and timely legal assistance and representation. Its Pathfinder software provides immigration law firms and nonprofits with a case repository and automated status alerts for clients and their families.
Pathfinder collects and analyzes government case information to provide, in under two minutes, a ready file of information that would otherwise take a paralegal or case worker up to an hour to assemble.
“Pathfinder in about 90 seconds will tell you everything the US government knows” about an immigrant, Mobile Pathways’ Bartlomiej Jan Skorupa told ImpactAlpha.
The tool is being used by hundreds of organizations in more than two dozen states; most of its users are based in California and Texas.
GitLab Foundation, Firedoll Foundation, AlleyCorp and Fast Forward last week provided $1 million to accelerate the technology’s development and rollout.
Security sensitivity
Detentions and deportations reached a 10-year peak last year under President Joe Biden. “You have to have an attorney,” said Skorupa, himself an immigrant to the US from Poland. Two out of three immigrants in court can’t afford legal representation.
Organizations like the San Francisco Bar Association’s Justice and Diversity Center send attorneys to volunteer at immigration court proceedings. “It’s like firefighting,” said Skorupa. “They’ve got five or 10 minutes to learn about [each case].”
Mobile Pathways’ AI tool is free, but the organization first vets each attorney and organization, “making sure the people that get access to Pathfinder are acting in the best interest of immigrants,” Skorupa said. “We make it very hard to get into, and we keep the security, from a digital perspective, as tight as possible.”
Mobile Pathways has gone the difficult route of building most of its AI capabilities in-house. Pathfinder was co-designed with many of the organizations now using it. Their feedback: “This is amazing – and a little scary,” Skorupa said, adding, “That’s a healthy attitude.”
Legal nonprofits need to integrate AI to speed up grant writing, legal briefs and other necessary, routine tasks.
“Ultimately AI is a tool – and a very powerful one,” said Skorupa. “How you wield it should be taken with great care.”
