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There are so many things that are wrong with ICE’s VOICE office. It’s an anti-immigrant smear campaign thinly veiled as a “public safety office.” It has historical roots in Nazi Germany, where a similar campaign was launched against Jewish citizens. Yesterday, an immigration attorney discovered that babies were mistakenly included in VOICE’s “criminal immigrant” database, because ICE is fucking incompetent. So it’s no surprise, then, that outraged Americans pranked the office’s 1-855-48-VOICE (6423) hotline with calls about criminal space aliens, something ICE did not quite appreciate. In fact, according to Fusion, ICE “kind of lost their shit.”
“This is the email I got from an ICE official,” writes Fusion’s Rafi Schwartz, “when I asked the agency for comment on the prank calls (emphasis mine)”:
The VOICE line remains in operation. As yesterday was its first day I can’t give you any sense of whether this group had any impact at all on wait times or call volume because there’s no prior data to compare.
I hope you won’t dignify this group with the attention they are seeking. But if you choose to do so...this group’s cheap publicity stunt is beyond the pale of legitimate public discourse. Their actions seek to obstruct and do harm to crime victims; that’s objectively despicable regardless of one’s views on immigration policy.
The VOICE Office provides information to citizens and non-citizens alike regardless of status, race, etc., whose loved ones have been killed or injured by removable aliens. VOICE provides access to the same information you and other reporters are already able to obtain. Yet this group claims it’s somehow racist to give the same to victims of all races and nationalities? That is absurd.
Further, openly obstructing and mocking victims crosses the line of legitimate public discourse. VOICE is a line for victims to obtain information. This group’s stunt is designed to harm victims. That is shameful.
What is “shameful,” “absurd,” and “despicable” is trotting out a “cheap publicity stunt” like VOICE and pretending to care about “victims” while simultaneously trying to strong-arm local law enforcement agencies over sanctuary cities and driving so much fear in immigrant communities over deportations that they are no longer reporting when they’ve been victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. Oh, Donald Trump cares about victims alright—if they’re white.