In August 2022, buses from the southern border[1] brought an influx of migrants to Chicago, mostly from the Caribbean, Central, and South America. The Resurrection project (TRP) was ready to help, but its resources for one-on-one assistance were already stretched thin. For more than 30 years, TRP has provided community-based services for a mostly immigrant and Latino population, including financial literacy, homeowner education, legal education, and legal services. For many years the migration patterns in Illinois and the City of Chicago have brought people mostly from Mexico and Central America.[2] These migrants have established roots and traveled to join extended family members. This new wave of primarily Venezuelan and Haitian migrants bused from the border did not choose Chicago and lacked the social support of settled family.
New opportunities to help
By the summer of 2023, new policies from the Biden administration brought new opportunities for legal help for these migrants. Temporary Protected Status was opened for Venezuelans, and new interim parole policies for most migrants meant the opportunity for a legal path to work. TRP’s approach to this combined challenge and opportunity was to add a new legal help clinic focused on completing two legal forms and several supporting documents: the I-765, or the Application for Employment Authorization and the I-821, Application for Temporary Protected Status, and up to 12 other supporting documents. The clinic, funded with help from the state of Illinois and a federal grant, also included a unique collaboration with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), and USCIS representatives appeared onsite at each clinic to allow applicants to provide biometric data and speed up the approval process of their work authorization.
Work authorization helps both migrants and the city and state whose resources the migrants otherwise depend on. Work, out of the shadows and in economically appropriate roles rather than restricted to the narrow range of opportunities for unauthorized work, enables migrants to leave expensive and overburdened city-paid shelters, integrate into the community, and supports communities’ need for workers.[3] For migrants, the economic impact is significant. Wages are 35% higher for authorized immigrants.[4]
Existing solutions were not enough
While USCIS has an existing web form for both the I-765 and the I-821, it did not work for the clinic. The migrants who participated in the clinic usually travel in family groups that shared most of the same answers, and having each applicant fill out their own copy of the web application dramatically slowed down the process. Most of the migrants also needed a fee waiver, which was not possible to complete online. TRP initially solved these problems by using the paper version of the forms, filling in partial forms for the head of household for each family group, photocopying the packet, and then completing the rest of the process one by one. This process took 2 hours per group.
TRP’s clinics are staffed by a mix of some of TRP’s 40 employees in the immigrant justice team and up to one hundred volunteers at its peak. The first pilot clinics in November 2023 saw between 100 and 200 attendees. By December, the clinics happened four times a week, and between 150 and 200 attendees were assisted at each clinic. In this first phase of the clinic, only prescreened families living in shelter were eligible to attend the clinic. By February of 2023, the clinic opened to a broader population including those in church-funded shelters, in part because the cutoff entry date for Temporary Protected Status was July 2023, and fewer of the new migrants qualified. During this second phase of the project, the clinic helped 80-100 migrants a day.
There were many challenges in the paper-based clinic. Families arrived with young children and ended up spending a full day at the clinic. The immigration program required precision, and the use of volunteers meant that TRP had to create a lot of complex and specific instructions. The pro bono volunteers, despite receiving training, made mistakes. Staff reported using “a lot of Whiteout” in the first months.
From paper to tech-enabled assistance
Jane Lombardi, head of partnerships at TRP, knew that there was a better way. One of her first legal internships was as an AmeriCorps VISTA[5][6] at Illinois Legal Aid Online (ILAO), the 20-year-old hub of online legal information and interactive legal help for Illinois.[7] ILAO builds and maintain dozens of self-help interactive legal applications for residents of Illinois with a staff of attorneys and technologists.[8] Years later, an online “EasyForm” built by ILAO helped Jane with her uncontested divorce. Jane knew that an interactive legal application could speed up the work and reached out to ILAO for help.
Since 2020, ILAO has worked with the Suffolk LIT Lab as partners with the Document Assembly Line. Along with Tony Danielson, an independent contractor with experience in Docassemble, and ILAO employee Matt Newsted, I worked with ILAO to take on this automation project, leveraging the standardized questions and framework of the Document Assembly Line as much as possible. The timeline was short. Every day, the clinic had as many as two hundred attendees who were doing things the “old, slow” way. We wanted to get the finished tool in the hands of the clinic as soon as possible. The first version of the tool was launched over the course of a few weeks in February 2024, with bug fixes and features rolled out of the next month and a half. Many features were built, released, tested, and fixed with a tight feedback loop. The hundreds of users each day quickly found issues and opportunities for improvement that were not caught in internal quality assurance.
Large language models as co-authors
While the tool does not use generative AI that directly faces the volunteer or attorney running the clinic, it was possible to build the tool as quickly as we did in part because of GitHub’s large language models code authoring tool, CoPilot. We also used the Document Assembly Line’s Weaver tool for the first draft of automations for this project, which has some new, experimental AI features of its own.[9] CoPilot is a code autocompletion tool that uses the context of the files that the programmer has opened in their authoring tool to make tailored, relevant suggestions.[10] It helped author repetitive sections of the code and even offered translation of some sections into Spanish. One interesting problem: when we tried to use CoPilot to transform or help author the human rights violation section of the application for temporary protected status, CoPilot refused to respond. CoPilot’s moderation feature prevented it from reformatting code that asked about terrorism, drug use, and violence.
The tool streamlined the data collection process by getting family information in one session, using defaults based on the head of household’s responses and skipping irrelevant questions for minors. For example: one section that potentially required up to 70 responses about human rights violations was condensed without reducing the accuracy of responses or preventing the ability for interpreters to follow along with a paper copy of the translated form.
By the numbers: helping 9,000 applicants in 6 months
From TRP’s perspective, the tool was a success. It helped flag issues during the screening process for the legal experts supervising the clinic, caught and prevented many errors, and saved lots of re-typing of the same answers. From the previous 2 hours for a typical family of four, the time to produce completed and reviewed paperwork was reduced to 45 minutes. Training time, too, was cut down because the tool provided guardrails for proper completion. Volunteers used the tool with more confidence, knowing that the application would prevent many errors. The faster clinic time was especially important for the families with children, who could now expect to spend ½ a day in the clinic instead of a full day waiting to be helped.
May 31, 2024, was the last day of the 4 days a week phase of the clinic. As of June, TRP began shifting to holding workshops 2 days/week, open to anyone regardless of housing status. USCIS is only processing people who get some kind of state- or federal-provided financial assistance, and TRP expects a smaller number of attendees: 50-60 each day.
Between the early pilot clinics in November 2023 and the end of May 2024, the clinic screened 8,800 applicants, and 7,696 of those applicants qualified for either TPS or employment authorization because of interim parole. Almost half of those applicants used the tool between February and May, representing 1,097 family groups and 4,440 individuals. If each group saved an hour and 15 minutes, the total time savings from the expert system was more than 1,370 hours.
[1] ‘Texas Transports Over 100,000 Migrants To Sanctuary Cities’ <https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/texas-transports-over-100000-migrants-to-sanctuary-cities> accessed 17 June 2024.
[2] Jeanne Batalova Emma Israel and Jeanne Batalova, ‘Mexican Immigrants in the United States’ (migrationpolicy.org, 4 November 2020) <https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/mexican-immigrants-united-states-2019> accessed 17 June 2024.
[3] ‘The Economic Benefits of Extending Permanent Legal Status to Unauthorized Immigrants | CEA’ (The White House, 17 September 2021) <https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2021/09/17/the-economic-benefits-of-extending-permanent-legal-status-to-unauthorized-immigrants/> accessed 16 June 2024.
[4] ibid.
[5] ‘AmeriCorps VISTA | AmeriCorps’ (16 September 2022) <https://americorps.gov/serve/americorps/americorps-vista> accessed 17 June 2024.
[6] The AmeriCorps VISTA program is a U.S. fellowship program that places recent college graduates in nonprofit and service-oriented roles around the country. It pays a modest stipend and includes education benefits that participants can use to fund continuing education or graduate school.
[7] ‘About ILAO’ <https://www.illinoislegalaid.org/about/about-ilao> accessed 16 June 2024.
[8] ‘Illinois Legal Aid Online: Form Library’ <https://www.illinoislegalaid.org/form-library> accessed 17 June 2024.
[9] Quinten Steenhuis, David Colarusso and Bryce Willey, ‘Weaving Pathways for Justice with GPT: LLM-Driven Automated Drafting of Interactive Legal Applications’ (arXiv, 14 December 2023) <http://arxiv.org/abs/2312.09198> accessed 17 June 2024.
[10] ‘GitHub Copilot · Your AI Pair Programmer’ (GitHub, 2024) <https://github.com/features/copilot> accessed 17 June 2024.