GoKawiilThe second trump administration was barely a week old when Rafael Concepcion came across the Facebook post that would upend his life. Its author was Maria Hernandez, the owner of a Mexican grocery store popular among Latino residents of New York’s Finger Lakes region. She wrote that several of her best customers had already gone into hiding. With sales plummeting, she offered to make free deliveries of food to anyone too scared of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to leave their home.
Concepcion, a second-generation immigrant and a professor at nearby Syracuse University, was so moved by Hernandez’s generosity that he made the 45-minute drive to her store to pay his respects and spend some money. A burly and gregarious 51-year-old who keeps his hair slicked back, Concepcion wore a black V-neck T-shirt and blue jeans as he perused the aisles filled with pan dulce, tomatillos, and prayer candles. In front of a refrigerator case, he spotted an African American customer staring at packages of chorizo. The man mistook Concepcion for an employee. “I don’t know what any of this stuff is,” the customer said. “But I saw the thing on Facebook, and I wanted to come in and help and support.”
Maria Hernandez inside her shop. Photograph: Luis Manuel Diaz
The visit to Hernandez’s store activated something deep inside Concepcion, a moral unease that would gradually blossom into an all-consuming drive to thwart ICE. In early February 2025, he described his experience at the Mexican market—not far from the home of Harriet Tubman—in an op-ed for the Syracuse Post-Standard. “I plan to help in any way I can. I hope you do, too,” he wrote. “History should count on us to do the right thing.” After the column attracted scores of irate comments (“How about FOLLOWING THE LAW. You people make me sick”), Concepcion felt compelled to escalate his activism. Polite op-eds were clearly insufficient against ICE, which had already tripled its daily arrests to more than 600 since President Trump’s latest inauguration.
Before he started teaching multimedia storytelling at Syracuse’s prestigious Newhouse School of Public Communications, Concepcion had worked around the edges of the tech industry for two decades. So he decided to develop a mobile app meant to teach immigrants how to exercise their constitutional rights when confronted by ICE.
Concepcion, who describes himself as having “the worst case of ADD you’ve ever seen,” became hyperfixated on the project. (The black V-neck and jeans he wore to Hernandez’s store are his uniform: He keeps 30 identical shirts and 30 identical pairs of pants to avoid being paralyzed by choice.) He leaned heavily on AI tools such as Cursor and ElevenLabs to build the app. Buzzing on heroic amounts of caffeine—“I drink, like, 14 cups of coffee a day,” he told me—Concepcion did most of his vibe coding between midnight and dawn while parked outside a Home Depot in his electric F-150 pickup. He chose the spot to feel kinship with the day laborers he hoped to reach, and he listened to endless repeats of songs from Hamilton as he worked.