Posted on 01/27/2013 2:38:14 PM PST by SandRat
SALT LAKE CITY - David Morales was on a Greyhound bus near Las Cruces, N.M., when Border Patrol agents stopped the bus for a routine check.
Morales, 21, rose up and informed his fellow passengers of their rights. That, he says, landed him in detention for nine hours before immigration agents decided to cut him loose.
The experience, he says, was his inspiration for developing an app to inform undocumented people of their rights in a wide array of scenarios ranging from traffic stops by city police officers to a workplace raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
"I can't be on every bus, but I can make something that can," Morales told the Deseret News.
The app, Derechos Herencia, which roughly translates as "inherited rights," is available for smartphone and tablet users at iTunes and Google Play.
"I want to make it available to everyone who has questions about immigration," he said.
Morales, who is an illegal immigrant, spent 17 days in jail following a previous encounter with immigration agents on another bus ride when he was 19. He was en route to a Bible college in Louisiana when agents boarded the bus for a routine enforcement check.
When agents asked him if he was a U.S. citizen, Morales told them he was not, and he was held in a detention center to await deportation proceedings.
He was released after his family posted a $4,000 bond. He was eventually granted administrative relief, which he believes was aided by the signatures of 15,000 people who supported him.
The app has a feature to create online petitions on behalf of people facing deportation.
Two lawyers have vetted the content of the app to ensure its accuracy, Morales said. The app is intended to be an educational resource for undocumented people in advance of encounters with local, state or federal authorities.
"It's kind of like the Mexican ACLU," he said, referring to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Morales, who plans to become a Christian minister and possibly attend law school, is also a plaintiff in the ongoing legal challenge to HB497, Utah's immigration enforcement law passed by the Legislature in 2011.
While Morales said he is optimistic that Congress will take up immigration reform, his family is like many others, with mixed immigration status, and different family members encounter a wide variety of challenges.
Can I get something like that for the next time I want to sneak into Mexico and live off their welfare system?
The only right he has is to go back across the Border and never come back.
I wish someone out there knew how to hack it, or whatever it would be called, and have it show a message purporting to be from ICE to the effect that “we’re on to you and we are tracking you in order to arrest you if you do not deport yourself back across the border” or something to that effect.
A group should get together and rent a billboard near a border crossing, displaying the relevant laws being broken and the attendent penalties. Not that they don’t already know, but just to make it clear that Americans don’t take their illegal activity lightly. Also, billboards showing the increase in formerly unheard-of diseases in the US, such as leprosy, and crime statistics by illegals, like drunk drivng deaths and rape.
This is a wonderful thing! Assuming anyone running this App is an illegal and all smart phones can be tracked, ICE should have no problem finding these people and deporting them.
For their obama phones?
Well, I don’t have much faith in ICE exerting themselves to do anything about them, but someone else could pretend to be something that sounds like ICE (because there’s surely laws against impersonating law enforcement), just close enough to trick an anxious illegal alien, and best case scenario, they would be anxious enough to self-deport.
You forgot Pedophilia.
Immigrants have rights. ILLEGAL immigrants DO NOT!
Maybe someone can lock onto his GPS signal and then give this illegals location to Sheriff Joe Arapio, to put the illegel into the “Tent City Desert Jail” of Arapio’s.
Yeah, that definitely needs to go on the billboard.
Or mess with their GPS so it directs them into Arizona, and then notify Sheriff Arapio when they’ve crossed the state line into Arizona. It would be soooo easy to detain and deport these illegals if our government (both parties) didn’t have their own reasons for scoffing at the law.
That’s why I say we should set up Second Amendment sanctuary cities/counties and dare them to harass citizens exercising their legal rights when they won’t arrest people breaking the law right out in the open, and are even givng them safe harbor. I’d love to hear them explain how that would work.
Also, we could have another billboard listing Mexico’s immigration laws and the penalties for breaking them.
They don’t have one.
This is because they want Whiteys goodies.
Every nation of color is at best, 2nd World.
They don’t have one.
This is because they want Whiteys goodies.
Every nation of color is at best, 2nd World.
We need a few apps for what citizen-slaves are still allowed to do, while being interrogated in the primary line and through various checkpoints, groped and irradiated by the mailroom clerks in uniforms, drones pointed at our houses for spying purposes, etc.
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