congressional app challenge 2026 open source · mit v2.2

beacon

congress built the immigration court system. beacon makes it navigable.

not another raid map. beacon turns public EOIR court data, ICE facility records, and representative votes into due-process tools anyone can use — in english, spanish, and chinese.

the scale

3.7M+immigration cases pending nationally
86%detained without legal counsel
11live civic modules
0personal data on our servers

"while raid-tracking apps use crowdsourced pins, beacon is built on congress's own FOIA data — with a client-side SHA-256 evidence chain for constitutional due process."

why not raid tracking

3.7M

cases backlog. families can't read 30GB of monthly EOIR releases. the data congress funds is public — but inaccessible.

86%

of detained immigrants proceed without a lawyer. due process shouldn't depend on parsing FOIA dumps.

beacon

zip-personalized court wait vs national average, enforcement pulse from FOIA stats, facility OIG flags, rights guides, tamper-evident evidence, rep watch.

raid maps

  • crowdsourced pins
  • politically polarizing
  • no court context
  • no due-process tools

beacon

  • congress's EOIR FOIA data
  • constitutional rights focus
  • court journey + backlog
  • SHA-256 evidence vault

11 modules click to open in app

for judges · 90 seconds

  1. open demo → enter ZIP 95014
  2. your brief → due process score + court vs national
  3. tap SOS → 4th amendment emergency card
  4. evidence vault → add entry → verify SHA-256 chain
  5. rep watch → congressional accountability

full judge guide →

stack

ZIP input  → EOIR court lookup + due-process scoring
Geo        → Haversine facility distance + rep district
Vault      → Web Crypto SHA-256 chain (client-side only)
Frontend   → Vanilla JS · Leaflet · PWA service worker
Backend    → Python · FastAPI · public government datasets
Deploy     → Hugging Face Spaces · beacon.ideatr.dev

open source

beacon is mit licensed. fastapi backend, vanilla JS frontend, public government datasets. no accounts, no tracking, no server-side PII.

github.com/arjunkshah12345-hash/beacon →