It seems like a million years ago, but it’s only been a few months since the Trump administration opened the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) hotline, launched under the guise of public safety but in reality a disgusting smear campaign to further demonize undocumented immigrants. While Splinter notes that a large portion of the calls initially made to VOICE were from wonderful Americans reporting green space aliens (thank you, Daily Kos community), a report finds others embraced the sinister, deplorable intentions envisioned by Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and the rest of his anti-immigrant administration. Records “show that hundreds of Americans seized on the hotline to lodge secret accusations against acquaintances, neighbors, or even their own family members, often to advance petty personal grievances”:
One caller, for instance, complained that her granddaughter was living in Florida with an undocumented immigrant, and further alleged that the immigrant was a sex offender. The suspect, the caller said, was in the process of receiving United States citizenship. Public records for the unredacted address in the call log did identify a middle-aged man with a Latino name living there, but not one who was listed on a sex-offender registry.
Beyond family strife, callers also sought to involve ICE in business disputes. One caller made an immigration complaint against an employee on a work visa at a ballroom-dance studio who was allegedly trying to start her own studio and lure customers away. Callers accused undocumented people of working at painting companies, a drywall installer, a demolition firm, a luxury resort, a foundry, a dairy, an alehouse, a Subway, and an “adult entertainment club.” They provided addresses, names, and sometimes even specific working hours.
“Some people appeared to go to great lengths to deliver information to the feds,” notes Splinter. “One caller, seeking to report a pair of supposedly undocumented workers, provided full names and aliases for both of them, along with the make, color, and license plate of the car they used, and the facts that they worked on a farm and attended a particular Planet Fitness gym ‘in the afternoons.’ Nowhere did the report include any claims of criminal activity beyond the alleged use of false documents.” Beyond being complicit in the racial profiling and the stalking of brown people, the VOICE office has also been incompetent—shortly after the launch, the administration came under fire for mistakenly including babies and and toddlers in its VOICE database of “bad hombres” under Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody.
from Daily Kos http://ift.tt/2kmef5D
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