It updates before the news does.
TPS Survival Guide, in the founder's words.
My name is Micah Berkley, and I built TPS Survival Guide — a free, trilingual, self-updating information lifeline for families living under Temporary Protected Status, one that collects zero personal data. When a government deadline vanished overnight, my site caught the change against the live source and published the truth in three languages the same evening. This page breaks down what I built, who I am, and why it exists.
You decide where to go from here.
Everything below is one page. Jump to what fits you — or keep reading straight through.
Nonpartisan, self-funded, sourced to primary government pages, and safe to cite. Here's exactly why.
See the government route → For nonprofits & legal aid We send people to you.Your organization may already be in the verified directory. No competition, no catch — just reach.
See the nonprofit route → For journalists A checkable story.A self-serve fact block, a documented scoop, and a direct line to the founder — no gatekeeping.
See the media route →Just reading? Start with why it exists →
I kept watching families decide their lives on a rumor.
Here in Miami, I kept seeing the same thing happen. A family would sit at the kitchen table and decide whether to quit a job, pull a kid out of school, or hand cash to a stranger who promised to fix their paperwork — all based on a date somebody heard secondhand.
The frightening part wasn't that people were careless. It's that the right answer was genuinely hard to find, and even when you found it, it was hard to trust. Official pages are written in dense English and they change without warning. Meanwhile the wrong answer — a rumor, a scam, an old date that's no longer true — travels fast and sounds certain.
I didn't think a scared family should have to become a legal researcher to get a straight answer in the language they actually speak. So I built the place I wished existed: one page they could open, trust, and forward — that tells them what is true right now, and admits what nobody yet knows.
I'm one person. I fund it myself. There's no ad money, no grant steering it, and no political money behind it. That isn't a limitation I'm apologizing for — it's the whole design. It means the only thing this project answers to is whether the information is correct and current.
A scared family shouldn't have to be a legal researcher to get a straight answer.
What follows is the honest breakdown: the night that proves why it matters, exactly what I built and how it works, and three specific ways an office, an organization, or a newsroom can use it. No faith required — everything here is something you can check yourself.
The night a deadline vanished — and the site said so first.
The date everyone planned around
USCIS had listed a July 10, 2026 work-permit date for Haiti. Hundreds of thousands of people — and the employers who hired them — treated it as the day permits ran out, and started making decisions accordingly.
It vanished the night of July 9
That evening, the July 10 date quietly disappeared from the USCIS Haiti page, replaced by court-order language tied to Miot v. Trump (No. 25-cv-02471-ACR, D.D.C.). Permits were now extended by court order, with no end date listed.
The site caught it and published the truth
My verification pipeline detected the change against the live government source, confirmed it, and I published a trilingual fact-check that same evening — spelling out what was true and what was not, while the old July 10 date kept spreading on social media as fact.
Read the published fact-check: the July 10 emergency — what is true
What I actually built.
It isn't a blog, a rumor thread, or a law firm's marketing page. It's a small piece of self-verifying public infrastructure. Here is each capability — and the proof it's real, not a slogan.
It re-checks its own facts three times a day
Three times daily, an automated pipeline verifies the site against 8 USCIS country pages and the Federal Register. The guardrail is strict: any change has to cite a live government URL fetched in that same run, or nothing publishes. A stale-but-true page always beats a fast wrong one — that discipline is exactly why it caught the July 10 change.
It asks nothing of the people it protects
The site collects no personal information from the people who read it. Even the anonymous community board takes only a screen name and a PIN — no email, no phone number, no real name. Nobody should have to trade their privacy for an answer, least of all a family that's already afraid.
Optimized for search engines and AI answers
A resource nobody can find helps no one. The site is built for search and for the AI answer engines people increasingly ask first — structured data, clean sourcing, machine-readable summaries — so that when someone types their fear into a search box, the verified answer is what comes back.
One page a family can open, trust, and forward.
Four things it does, that most resources can't.
Plain, sourced facts — not opinion
It turns the shifting rules around Temporary Protected Status into plain answers a person can act on, and ties every claim to a primary government source, cited right on the page. When the honest answer is "no," it says no. When a claim can't be traced, it's labeled unverified rather than repeated.
Real help, checked one by one
Legal clinics, food, housing, and jobs — 120+ organizations, each verified on its own live website, with dead domains caught and no phone numbers invented. A "near you" view covers five major metros, and it sends people to those organizations, never between them and their clients.
Trilingual, labeled honestly
Every route runs in English, Haitian Creole, and Spanish, with full hreflang so search engines serve the right one. Where a translation is machine-assisted, it's labeled as such — and a missing localized version falls back to verified English rather than show a stale date in someone's own language.
A place to ask, without exposure
People can ask a real question and share what worked — with just a screen name and a PIN. An AI pre-screen and a human review keep it safe, and nothing personal is stored. If you forget your PIN, even I can't recover the account. That's on purpose.
What's on the site
- Live status board
- Legal facts & the ruling explained
- Your rights / know-your-rights
- Find help & verified directory
- Resources near you — 5 metros
- Newsroom & rumor fact-checks
- Anonymous community board
- Print-ready trilingual rights card
How it's built — in plain English
A fast Astro static site on Cloudflare. AI verification runs through the Cloudflare AI Gateway; GitHub Actions re-check the facts three times a day. The anonymous community features run on Cloudflare D1, with an AI pre-screen before a human review.
How it's funded
A nonprofit, self-funded project. No ads, no data collection, no grants, no political money — nonpartisan by design. It is general information, not legal advice, and it's not affiliated with any government agency.
Can your office share this? Yes — and here's why that's safe.
I know the real question isn't whether this is useful — it's whether an office can point residents to it without violating a linking or endorsement policy. So let me answer that head-on. TPS Survival Guide is nonpartisan, self-funded, and collects no data about anyone who visits. It is not affiliated with USCIS, DHS, or any government agency, and it makes that clear on every page. Every factual claim is tied to a primary government source your staff can open and confirm in seconds.
In practice, that means it behaves like the referral infrastructure you already trust: a citable, sourced, in-language resource you can list next to your 211 line, in a library guide, or in a constituent newsletter — at no cost, and with nothing to defend if someone asks where it came from, because the sources are right there.
A short letter-of-support template, if your office wants one on file
Copy, edit, and put it on your letterhead. Nothing here commits public funds or endorses a position — it simply notes the resource is sourced and useful.
We don't compete with you. We send people to you.
Let me lead with what you get, not what I want. TPS Survival Guide does not do casework, fundraising, or client relationships. It does one thing: keep the facts straight and point frightened people toward organizations like yours. Your work is the destination — this is just a cleaner road to your door.
There's a good chance your organization is already listed. The directory holds 120+ verified organizations, and each was checked on its own live website — so being in it is free, ongoing discovery for you, from families who are actively searching for exactly what you provide. If you're listed and something's out of date, or you're not listed and should be, that's a two-minute fix I'll make gladly.
- Discovery
- Families actively searchingFound by people who need your service today
- Verification
- Checked on your live siteAccurate contact info, no invented numbers
- Reach
- Trilingual · 5 metrosEN · Kreyòl · Español, near-you views
- Boundary
- We stop at the referralNo casework, no fundraising, no middleman
A checkable story — and a direct line to me.
The story writes itself, and it's independently verifiable: on the night of July 9, 2026, a work-permit deadline hundreds of thousands of people were counting on vanished from the USCIS Haiti page and was replaced by court-order language. A one-person, self-funded site detected the change against the live source and published a trilingual fact-check the same evening — ahead of the correction reaching the news. You can confirm every piece of that yourself.
- Founder
- Micah BerkleyBuilt and funded the project himself, in Miami
- Launched
- June 2026tpssurvivalguide.com
- Languages
- 3 — EN · Kreyòl · EspañolFull hreflang; machine translation labeled honestly
- Update cadence
- 3× daily7am · 1pm · 7pm ET, automated
- Sources watched
- 8 USCIS pages + Fed. RegisterCitation-required guardrail before anything publishes
- Verified orgs
- 120+58 across 5 metros · 65 in directory
- Funding
- Self-funded, nonprofitNo ads, no grants, no political money
- Data collected
- Zero personal dataCommunity board: screen name + PIN only
Methodology, in one line: an automated pipeline fetches the live government pages three times a day; a change publishes only if it cites a government URL fetched in that same run; "verified" orgs are those confirmed on their own live websites; the community board runs an AI pre-screen before human review. The July 10 fact-check is live at tpssurvivalguide.com/news/july-10-emergency-what-is-true/.
The simplest way to help is to share it.
Whichever route brought you here, the ask is the same and it's small: put a verified, in-language answer one click closer to a family that needs it. Linking to it costs nothing, commits you to nothing, and stays nonpartisan — no money changes hands and no data about anyone is shared.
I built this because I couldn't watch families keep deciding their lives on a rumor. If it's useful to you, use it. If you have a question, I'm easy to reach.
press@tpssurvivalguide.com