As a former legal aid attorney, Kevin De Liban knows President Donald Trump’s plan to double down on artificial intelligence comes with major risks. Over and over, De Liban has seen how automated decisions can ruin people’s lives.
Just before Christmas in 2022, for example, Robert Austin and his daughter were living in his car in El Paso, Texas. As a single father, he had a hard time finding a shelter that would take them both.
He applied for food stamps, temporary aid, and tried to enroll his daughter in Medicaid, so she’d get health insurance from the government. Though they were eligible, his benefits were denied. Austin tried again; this time, the Health and Human Services helpline said the paperwork he’d uploaded had been rejected and he needed to reapply. “They kept asking for the same forms, over and over again,” Austin says. Every time he’d call to try to get to the bottom of things, he ended up “full circle back where [he] began.”
Eventually, Austin turned to lawyers at Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, who learned that Texas’s automated verification system, developed by multinational consulting firm Deloitte, had made extensive and repeated errors, including issuing incorrect notices, wrongful denials, and losing paperwork.
For the next two years, Austin continued to reapply to Texas’s safety-net programs as he bounced in and out of temporary housing, eventually losing his car. While his daughter grew into a busy toddler, he turned to the unreliable kindness of strangers on the street. “I ended up begging people for money so I could give her pull-ups, or child care so I could take a [medical] appointment,” he says.
Though De Liban was not involved with Austin’s case, he has worked with scores of people trapped…
Auteur: Lois Parshley
