Donald Trump and Department of Homeland Security Sec. John Kelly have rolled out the latest effort in their campaign to demonize immigrants and their families—a disgusting “VOICE” office to track crimes allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants:
The Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) office was created in response to one of President Donald Trump’s executive orders, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary John Kelly said at a press conference.
“All crime is terrible, but these victims as represented here are unique, and they are all too often ignored,” Kelly said. “They are casualties of crimes that should never have taken place because the people who victimized them should never have been here in our country. These crimes, in many ways, were preventable.”
Kelly shook the hands of family members of people killed or injured by undocumented immigrants, before leaving the DC press conference without taking questions.
Here’s the truth: “unauthorized immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than the American population at large,” according to multiple studies. And the pro-immigrant sanctuary city policies that Trump loves to hate actually make communities safer, because local law enforcement agencies are able to build trust with immigrant residents. But truth isn’t Trump’s intention here. As the Atlantic notes, if “Trump’s goal is stigmatizing a vulnerable class of people, then publicizing their crimes—and their crimes alone—makes sense. It’s been a tactic bigots have used more than a century”:
In The Nazi Conscience, Duke historian Claudia Koonz notes that the Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer ran a feature called “Letter Box,” which published readers’ accounts of Jewish crimes. When the Nazis took power, the German state began doing something similar. Frustrated by the failure of most Germans to participate in a boycott of Jewish businesses in April 1933, Adolf Hitler’s government began publicizing Jewish crime statistics as a way of stoking anti-Semitism. In Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, the historian Saul Friedlander notes that, until 1938, Hitler’s Ministry of Justice ordered prosecutors to forward every criminal indictment against a Jew so the ministry’s press office could publicize it.
The office was initially announced in conjunction with reports aimed to shame sanctuary cities—until Trump was forced to abruptly end the campaign after only three weeks because an “incompetent” ICE included so many errors in the reports. According to the New York Times, VOICE will be housed within ICE as well, and run with tax dollars no less. That’s reassuring.
Frighteningly, this appears to be just the beginning of DHS’s plan: “ICE is employing a measured approach to building the VOICE office, meaning that it intends to expand the services VOICE offers in the future,” ICE tweeted. Arizona Democrat, Rep. Ruben Gallego, translates what those “services” really are: VOICE “is a piece of propaganda pushed by the Trump administration that's going to spread fear about a community."
