Free. Bilingual. Nothing stored.
A family's plan for a parent's detention.
Red Binder turns one set of facts into the documents a family needs before a parent is detained — a power of attorney, a plan, a pocket card, a path to counsel. It runs in the browser, asks for no account, and keeps nothing. Built in two days by directing AI agents and verifying every legal claim in the open, and live now at redbinderproject.org.
The law is good. It rots in the administrative layer — the forms, the logins, the instructions.
A child-support calculator that asks an ordinary parent for a bar number. A revenue department that tells families, in writing, to search Google. The doctrine is sound; the delivery is broken — and the gap is a choice, not a constraint, because Washington closed it: a free calculator that runs in your browser, needs no account, and prints the worksheet you file. Red Binder closes one of those gaps — for families preparing for a parent's detention.
One legal problem, taken all the way to a live tool
It began as a research question — what is ICE getting detained people to sign, and why is it worse than it looks? The answer became a specification, the specification became a generator, and the generator went live at redbinderproject.org. Two days, end to end.
The method is the lesson: a lawyer directs a team of AI agents the way they'd direct junior associates — one reads the statutes and case law into a precise spec, one writes the engine, one reviews every legal claim, one deploys, one runs a full acceptance pass — and the lawyer keeps the one thing the machine can't supply: judgment, voice, and the legal sign-off.
We're hired for judgment, not math skills. Let the machine do the work, and show the rule behind every line.
The hard calls, shown per line
Red Binder is small on the surface and dense underneath. Every line traces to a rule. The calls that mattered:
- Statutory interpretation under pressure → a precise, testable spec.Reducing the stipulated-removal-vs-voluntary-departure distinction (8 C.F.R. § 1003.25(b); INA § 240B; the § 212(a)(9) bars) to a rule a frightened person can act on — and reducing fifty-one POA regimes to one universal instrument adapted by state, never fifty-one forms. The spec is where the work hides.
- The advice / information line.UPL, disclaimers, where a tool stops and a lawyer starts. The output is a draft to be executed — a POA isn't effective until signed and notarized — and the detention content stayed behind a "Draft — for attorney review" marker until counsel signed it off.
- Verification discipline — be wrong in the open.A full acceptance pass against ground truth surfaced two real defects (a document referencing a power of attorney that wasn't generated; padded blank rows) — both fixed in public. The legal reviewer caught a live injunction (Make the Road v. Noem staying the expedited-removal expansion) and corrected the source before it shipped.
- Building for vulnerable users.Privacy as data that's never created; data minimization as the shape of the form; bilingual access; and the hard calls — fear of return captured as a flag, never a written narrative that could later impeach an asylum claim; the carried card structurally barred from holding any identifier.
- Open source, licensing, stewardship.MIT for the code, CC BY 4.0 for the legal content, with a no-endorsement clause that protects the author when a town forks and adapts. Build to own, not rent — and decide who maintains a public good after launch.
Four documents from one set of facts
Power of Attorney
One universal instrument, adapted to each state's law — so a trusted person can act on money, home, and children.
Red Binder Plan
A family overview a trusted person can act on fast: the kids, the papers, the passwords, who to call.
Pocket Plan
A carried card — the script, the one "do not sign" rule — and a binder page a lawyer can act from.
Form G-28
The form that lets a lawyer get ICE case information — the bridge to counsel, for an attorney to complete and sign.
A power of attorney for every state
Fifty-one regimes, one engine. Each jurisdiction is classified by how its form works, so the tool never hands someone a document their state won't honor — the spec lesson, rendered.
Every state, plus DC
One universal document, adapted state by state — never 51 separate forms.
Illustrative classification for this page; the live states.ts data layer is the source of truth. States still being confirmed render as "pending," never as a settled claim.
How a public legal tool stays honest
The hardest part of a tool like this isn't the build. It's keeping it true after it ships, while the law moves underneath it. Four disciplines hold it together.
Verified against ground truth
A full acceptance pass against the controlling authority — and the state's own output — surfaced two real defects: a referenced POA that wasn't generated, and padded blank rows. Both fixed in public.
A legal-review gate
Detention content stayed behind a "Draft — for attorney review" marker until counsel signed off. The reviewer caught a live injunction — Make the Road v. Noem — and corrected the source before it shipped.
Honest as the law moves
Law that changes weekly can't be frozen in a static page. Volatile claims point to the trackers and carry the date they were last reviewed — current-awareness as a standing discipline, not a one-time edit.
Privacy you can check
The keep-nothing guarantee is enforced by a build gate and visible in the source — provable in code, not asserted in a policy. The repository is the proof.
Nothing stored
The whole tool runs in the browser. No account, no server that sees the family's facts, no analytics on what they typed. The data a frightened family enters is never created on anyone else's machine — which is the only privacy promise worth making to people who are right to fear anything official.
For this audience, the safest record is the one that doesn't exist. Privacy as data that's never created.
Built to be forked, not gatekept
Red Binder is meant to be taken. The code is MIT, the legal content is CC BY 4.0, and a no-endorsement clause lets a town or clinic adapt it without putting words in the author's mouth. Two worked artifacts are already out there to start from.
This page is a teaching artifact, not legal advice.