Military Family Separation Registry — Privacy Notice
Effective Date: August 31, 2026 Last Updated: August 31, 2026 Applies to: families.myfreedomops.com and reunite.myfreedomops.com (the "Registry") Operator: myFreedomOps LLC, Fort Irwin, CA Privacy Contact: sedjro@myfreedomops.com
This is not a Department of Defense system. The Registry is not run by, endorsed by, or affiliated with the Department of Defense, any military service, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or the Department of State. Because it is not a federal system of records, the Privacy Act of 1974 does not apply to it — which is precisely why the technical limits described below carry the whole burden.
1. What the Registry is for
The Registry counts U.S. service members who are separated from a spouse, fiancé(e), child, or parent who cannot obtain a U.S. visa. The purpose is to produce aggregate statistics — counts and patterns — for family-readiness offices, service family programs, advocacy organisations, and elected representatives.
The Registry is not a case-management system. It does not track, advise on, or advance anyone's immigration case, it cannot contact any government agency on your behalf, and submitting a response has no effect whatsoever on your case.
2. The short version
- No account is required. You are never asked to create one.
- We never ask for your name, or your relative's.
- We never ask for a case number, receipt number, or A-number.
- We never ask for your unit, installation, or duty address.
- Your
.miladdress, if you provide one, is used once to send a code and is then converted to a one-way value from which it cannot be recovered. - Published statistics never describe fewer than five families at once.
- If you verified with a
.miladdress, you can delete your response at any time.
3. What we collect
3.1 Your response
| Category | What is collected | Granularity |
|---|---|---|
| Service | Branch, component | Exact |
| Service | Pay grade | Band only (E-1–E-4, E-5–E-6, E-7–E-9, Warrant, O-1–O-3, O-4 and above) |
| Service | Where you are stationed | Region only — one of fourteen coarse buckets such as "U.S. — Southeast" or "Indo-Pacific" |
| Service | Time in service | Band only |
| Service | Your own immigration status | Citizen / lawful permanent resident / other |
| Family | Which family member is separated | Spouse, fiancé(e), child, parent, widow(er), other |
| Family | That person's country of citizenship | Country only |
| Family | Whether they are in the United States | Yes / no |
| Family | Number of children affected, and whether a child is separated from a parent | Band only (none, 1, 2, 3 or more) |
| Case | Immigration pathway and where the case is stuck | From a fixed list |
| Case | Time since filing, and time apart | Band only |
| Impact | Which impacts apply, and what you have already tried | From fixed checklists |
| Impact | Effect on your intention to stay in the service | From a fixed list |
| Optional | A free-text note, up to 2,000 characters | See §6 |
| Consent | That you consented, and which version of the notice you saw | Timestamp + version string |
3.2 What we deliberately do not collect
Your name. Your relative's name. Any date of birth. Your unit, installation, duty address, or duty ZIP. Your DoD ID or EDIPI. Your Social Security number. Any USCIS receipt number, alien registration (A-) number, or consular case number. Your relative's address, phone number, or email. Your exact pay grade, exact duty station, or exact dates.
These are not "optional fields we leave blank." There is no field for them, and there will not be one.
3.3 Automatically collected
Our hosting providers keep standard server request logs, which include IP addresses, for operational and security purposes. The Registry itself sets no cookies, uses no analytics, and contains no advertising or tracking scripts of any kind.
4. Why the Registry is built this way
The people this Registry describes are foreign nationals whose immigration status is unresolved. A list that identified them would be a hazard to the very people it exists to help: it could be sought by subpoena, exposed by a breach, or misused, and the consequences would fall on the relative — the person with the least protection and no say in whether the Registry existed.
Advocacy does not need identities. A family-programs office cannot act on one named family; it acts on counts, durations, and patterns. The identified version of this dataset would carry all of the risk and none of the additional value. So the Registry is built so that it cannot identify anyone, and that limitation is deliberate and permanent.
5. Your .mil address
If you choose to confirm your military affiliation:
- You enter a
.miladdress and we email a six-digit code to it. - The address is immediately converted to a salted one-way value. The address itself is never written to our database in readable form. The only place it exists in readable form is that one outgoing email.
- That value exists for exactly one purpose: to stop one person filing many responses. It cannot be reversed into your address.
- The value stored against your response and the value used during confirmation are deliberately different, so the two records cannot be matched to each other even by someone holding our salt.
Confirming is optional. If you cannot reach military email, you may still take part. Those responses are recorded as self-attested and reported on their own line — never merged into the confirmed figure.
The trade-off, stated plainly: an unconfirmed response cannot later be withdrawn, because nothing is stored that could identify it as yours. That is the same property that makes it safe.
6. The optional free-text note
If you write a note, our server removes government and contact identifiers before storing it — alien registration numbers, USCIS receipt numbers, Social Security numbers, DoD IDs, consular case numbers, passport-shaped tokens, email addresses, and phone numbers are replaced with [removed]. This happens regardless of what your browser sent.
Notes are never published and are automatically deleted twelve months after they are written. The statistical response survives; only the text is erased.
7. How information is used
To produce aggregate statistics; to share those statistics with family-readiness offices, service family programs, advocacy organisations, and elected representatives; to operate and secure the Registry; and to comply with law.
We do not sell information, share it with data brokers, use it for advertising, or use it to make any decision about any individual.
8. How statistics are published
Published figures apply small-cell suppression: any category describing fewer than five families is withheld and counted only in a visible "too few to publish" total. Below five responses in total, no breakdown is published at all.
This is standard statistical disclosure control. A published count of one is a description of a person.
9. Who processes information
| Provider | Role | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Vercel | Web hosting | United States |
| Render | API hosting | United States |
| Supabase | Database hosting | United States |
| Resend | Sends the confirmation code email only | United States |
No analytics, advertising, payment, or data-enrichment provider is involved.
10. Legal requests
We would treat any subpoena or legal demand as an attempt to obtain information about identifiable people, and would object to the extent the law allows and notify affected people where permitted.
We also tell you honestly what that protection is worth: the Registry holds no privilege, and we cannot promise that data will never be compelled. What we can say is that the Registry is built so that a complete copy of the database would not identify you or your relative — because the identifying information was never collected.
11. Retention
| Data | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Your statistical response | Indefinitely, in anonymous form, as part of the count |
| Free-text notes | 12 months, then automatically erased |
Confirmation records (.mil challenge) | Minutes to hours; deleted once used or expired |
| Advocacy mailing list | Until you unsubscribe |
| Host request logs | Per each provider's standard retention |
12. Your choices
- Take part without confirming — counted, reported separately, cannot be withdrawn.
- Withdraw a confirmed response — at any time, from the Registry's front page, by confirming the same
.miladdress. The row is deleted, not flagged. - Skip the free-text note — it is optional.
- Leave the mailing list — every message includes an unsubscribe link.
- Ask us anything — sedjro@myfreedomops.com.
Where a privacy law gives you rights of access, correction, deletion, or portability, we honour them to the extent we can. Be aware of the limit: for an unconfirmed response, we genuinely cannot locate your data, because nothing links it to you. That is a consequence of the design, not a refusal.
13. The advocacy mailing list
If you join the list, your email address is stored in a separate table with no connection of any kind to any response — no shared identifier, no foreign key. It records only the date you joined, not a timestamp, so the order in which people joined cannot be lined up against the order in which responses arrived.
Someone holding both tables still could not determine who reported what. This is deliberate.
14. Registrants stationed outside the United States
We expect them. Service members are stationed in Europe, the Indo-Pacific, and elsewhere, and the Registry's own duty-region list offers "Europe" as an option. It would be incoherent to invite those responses and then claim the Registry is offered only to people in the United States.
Where UK or EU data protection law applies to someone taking part while in those territories:
- Lawful basis: consent. Consent is explicit, given by an unticked box you must tick, recorded with the version of this notice you saw, and — for confirmed responses — withdrawable at any time.
- Where data goes: the United States. All four providers listed in §9 are US-based, and there is no EU or UK establishment or processing location.
- What is actually held about you. This matters more than it might sound. A self-attested response contains no identifier of any kind and cannot be linked to you by anyone, including us — so for that response there is nothing to access, correct, or erase, because there is no personal data. A confirmed response is linked only to a salted one-way value, which is pseudonymous rather than anonymous; and the advocacy mailing list holds a real email address and is unambiguously personal data.
- Rights. Contact sedjro@myfreedomops.com. We will honour access, correction, erasure, and portability requests to the extent the data exists in a form we can locate — see the limit described in §12.
We have not appointed a representative in the EU or UK under Article 27 of the GDPR. If you are taking part from the EU or the UK and wish to exercise a right or raise a concern, write to sedjro@myfreedomops.com and we will respond.
15. Children
The Registry is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. Information about children appears only as counts in bands ("1", "2", "3 or more") and a yes/no about separation from a parent. No child is identified or identifiable.
16. Changes
Material changes will be posted here with a new effective date, and the version string recorded with each response lets us tell which notice a participant actually saw.
17. Contact
myFreedomOps LLC · Fort Irwin, CA · sedjro@myfreedomops.com
For help with your actual immigration case, this Registry is the wrong place. Contact your installation legal assistance office, which advises service members and dependants at no cost, or the USCIS military help line at 877-247-4645. The Registry's resources panel lists further options.