Every day, people detained by immigration authorities file urgent legal requests in federal court, asking judges to intervene — to challenge an unlawful detention, to restore a right that has been taken away, to reunite a family. These are called habeas corpus petitions, one of the oldest and most fundamental protections in our legal system. Many of these people have no lawyer. They write their petitions by hand, or with the help of another detained person, and file them from inside a detention facility. You would expect these cases to be publicly available. They are, technically, but with a catch that effectively hides them from view. Immigration Justice Transparency Initiative exists to fix that.