[Guest Post by JD Godchaux, Executive Director and Lela Prashad, Chief Technology Officer of NiJeL | Community Impact Through Mapping. Lela holds an MS in Geological Sciences from Arizona State University (ASU). JD holds a Master in Public Administration from ASU. Lela and JD worked to deploy Unite Arizona along with Project Manager of Unite Arizona, Layal Rabat. Lela can be reached at lprashad 'at' nijel.org, JD at jd 'at' nijel.org, and Layal at lrabat 'at' nijel.org.] As you may be aware, Arizona Senate Bill 1070 (SB 1070) recently passed the Arizona legislature and was signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer. The Associated Press described the four "key provisions" of this new law, which - if it survives various legal challenges - will go into effect on July 28, 2010. According to the AP, the new law:

• Makes it a crime under state law to be in the country illegally by specifically requiring immigrants to have proof of their immigration status. Violations are a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and a fine of up to $2,500. Repeat offenses would be a felony.
• Requires police officers to 'make a reasonable attempt' to determine the immigration status of a person if there is a 'reasonable suspicion' that he or she is an illegal immigrant. Race, color or national origin may not be the only things considered in implementation. Exceptions can be made if the attempt would hinder an investigation.
• Allow lawsuits against local or state government agencies that have policies that hinder enforcement of immigration laws. Would impose daily civil fines of $1,000-$5,000. There is pending follow-up legislation to halve the minimum to $500.
• Targets hiring of illegal immigrants as day laborers by prohibiting people from stopping a vehicle on a road to offer employment and by prohibiting a person from getting into a stopped vehicle on a street to be hired for work if it impedes traffic.

There has been much discussion in the national and local media with respect to this law and it's implementation, specifically the potential use of racial profiling by law enforcement to apprehend and deport illegal immigrants in Arizona. However, this is nothing new to Arizona. Over the last several years, some law enforcement agencies in Arizona have been particularly aggressive in enforcing Federal immigration laws and other state and local laws to apprehend and remove illegal immigrants from the state. For example, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office conducted a raid at City Hall in Mesa, AZ on October 17, 2008. The raid took place at about 2:00 am targeting the Mesa City Hall cleaning crew and 13 people were apprehended on suspicion of being in the country illegally. This was just one of many "raids" or "sweeps" that have occurred here with regularity in recent times. Whatever your personal position is on the issue of immigration, there are a few things that we all should be able to agree on. First, the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly states in Section 1 that States cannot "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws" (emphasis mine). The architects of the 14th Amendment were careful not to use the word citizen in the second half of Section 1, a word they had used twice in the prior clause. All this to say that persons within the borders of the Unites States do have rights granted by Federal and State laws that cannot be infringed upon. Second, we think we should all be able to agree that people should not have to live in fear, whether it be fear of criminal activity in their neighborhood, fear of workplace raids, intimidation or harassment, or fear of being potentially deported for reporting a crime. Many people in the U.S. and Mexico live in fear of criminal activity perpetrated by organized gangs often times involved in moving drugs or people across the U.S./Mexico border. One only has to look at the state of fear that the residents of Juarez, Mexico must endure to know that this is unacceptable. With the expansion of law enforcement powers under SB 1070, it is likely that some legal U.S. residents, green card holders, H1B Visa holders, and other legal residents of Arizona will fear their interaction with law enforcement because they speak a language other than English, they speak English with an accent, or they are a member of a racial or ethnic minority group. There are large number of cases, such as this one, where U.S. citizens have been detained or deported, and with aggressive enforcement of SB 1070, many more legal U.S. citizens could find themselves detained for long periods of time or even deported. This is also unacceptable. Finally, we think we all can agree that people should be able to report criminal activity against them, their family or their friends (or crime they've witnessed) without fear of retribution. Whether or not safeguards are in place to protect those in the United States illegally who need to report criminal activity, with SB 1070 as the law of Arizona, it will be very difficult to establish a trust relationship between these people and law enforcement. As a result, some crime will undoubtedly go unreported and criminals will learn quickly that they can prey upon those who are here illegally - those who are afraid to call on law enforcement and cannot fight back. This might be the most unacceptable, perhaps unintended, outcome of SB 1070.

Unite Arizona

At NiJeL, we watched closely as this bill made its way through the Arizona House and Senate, and we urged the Governor not to sign it. When she did, we thought about how best to respond to this issue with the tools we had at hand. It was our former intern, now Project Manager and Volunteer Coordinator of Unite Arizona, Layal Rabat, who developed the idea at ICCM 2009 to use Ushahidi as a tool to track the immigration raids and sweeps. Rather than limit the implementation to the raids or sweeps, we collectively decided to expand the focus to include unreported crime, harassment by law enforcement, harassment by non-law enforcement, organized intimidation, hate group activity, and boycotts. We're also considering an expansion of the categories to include positive efforts made by law enforcement and others to lessen tensions within and across our Arizona communities. As we mentioned before, harassment and intimidation of racial minorities has been happening in Arizona for some time, and there are other organizations providing support and services to people involved in these incidents. Yet this is the first instance in which an open platform has been deployed to track the impacts of immigration policies Arizona's state, county and city governments and law enforcement agencies have put in place. It's unclear how often incidents of harassment, intimidation and other organized efforts to instill fear in minority populations will occur - in fact the main function of Unite Arizona is to attempt to understand the scale and scope of the problem. Since the launch of Unite Arizona, we've heard from both supporters and detractors of SB 1070, and we've responded to these groups with the same few messages. First, the Ushahidi platform is open for anyone to use, be it viewing the data, submitting an incident, or getting alerts of local reports, and we're crafting policies on report approval and validation that will be open for all to see. Next, we're working very hard to disseminate the text message and voicemail number - 602-824-TALK (8255) - the twitter hashtag - #MHRSAZ - the email address - report@immigrantharassment.com - and the url - ImmigrantHarassment.com - and if we've done a good job of disseminating this information, then a lack of reports to the system might indicate that SB 1070 did not lead to increased levels of harassment and intimidation. It is possible that this might happen, but it would be impossible to know if harassment and intimidation was occurring without some tool to measure it. Unite Arizona provides an independent tool that people can use to anonymously report incidents, and it provides a simple framework for understanding how big of a problem we have here in Arizona.

Technical Aspects

For those of you who follow this blog with an eye toward interesting Ushahidi implementations, we've done a few things differently on the back end than the "traditional" out-of-the-box installation. To keep costs down initially, we're using a Qwert unlimited SMS plan ($20 per month; $10 activation), which you can use in the U.S. with any unlocked GSM handset. We're hoping that future funding will enable us to set up and rent an SMS short code from Clickatell, which will preclude the need for this SMS plan, but for now, this appears to be working well. However, we're currently only using the Qwert along with FrontlineSMS for our sending out SMS alerts. Qwert provides you with a random U.S. phone number, and in our case the area code is 978. For our local SMS number - 602-824-TALK (8255) - we're using Google Voice to bring messages directly into Ushahidi. Google Voice allows you to forward incoming voice and SMS messages to an email account, and so we're simply forwarding the messages we receive on our Google Voice number to the reporting email address - report@immigrantharassment.com. One advantage this offers over a regular SMS system is that Google Voice attempts to do voice mail transcription, so if a reporter attempted to call the number above instead of texting, we would still be able to incorporate their message, which is machine-transcribed by Google Voice. Admittedly, machine transcription is limited and we're unsure how the system will respond to machine translation in Spanish, but we're hoping that this might allow more people to use the system who are calling from public pay phones or land lines where SMS is not an option. Given the wide array of news reports related to immigration and the lack of appropriate, available news feeds, we've relied on Google News to help us pre-process news from over 40 local, national and international news organizations. We've created feeds with Google News that pull stories from each news organization that have both "Arizona" and "Immigration" in their body. By using this method, we've been able to create reports directly from news stories with greater frequency than we otherwise could.

How to Help

As we mentioned above, we're currently putting together a protocol for volunteer moderation, but if anyone would like to help us moderate incoming reports, please contact us. In addition, if your organization would like to show support for this effort and would like more information about how to get involved, we'd love to hear from you. Finally, you can also help us by following our updates on Twitter and becoming a fan of our project on Facebook. Thank you!