Icebreaker Forms

Icebreaker Forms is a privacy-first web application that helps families and advocates navigate the U.S. immigration detention and bond process and prepare the legal forms it requires. Detention paperwork is a maze — EOIR appeals, attorney appearance forms like the G-28 and EOIR-28, bond contracts, and financial-support declarations such as the I-134, each with its own rules and filing quirks. Icebreaker Forms replaces that maze with a single guided intake wizard that determines which forms a person actually needs, collects the necessary information once, and produces filled, ready-to-file PDFs. It's built to assist with form preparation, not to provide legal advice.

The intake wizard routes users through one of seven situation paths — covering arrest documentation, representation, bond eligibility, relief screening, and posting bond — capturing only what's relevant to their case. Rather than expecting users to understand immigration law, the app infers the correct form set from their answers. Completed forms can be downloaded individually or bundled into a single filing packet, with an optional pipeline that emails the finished packet directly to the submitter. Privacy was a design priority throughout. PDFs are generated entirely client-side, so sensitive personal information never has to touch a server, and saved draft sessions are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM. Building this meant solving problems unique to government paperwork: reverse-engineering undocumented PDF form fields and working around USCIS's AES-encrypted, rich-text forms to make programmatic filling reliable. The app is also fully bilingual in English and Spanish, with localization architected so the legal output stays consistent regardless of display language.

Icebreaker Forms is a full-stack TypeScript monorepo — React, Vite, and Tailwind on the front end with pdf-lib for in-browser PDF generation, and Node.js, Express, and MySQL on the back end, plus an n8n workflow for automated email delivery.