The Trump administration has already botched its new programs on immigrant crime - Washington Post

Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly announcing the opening of the new Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) office. (Getty Images)

The Trump administration continued its quest to criminalize and demonize immigrants in the United States last week, with the formation of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Victims of Immigrant Crime Engagement Office (VOICE), which, according to the Department of Homeland Security, will “assist victims of crimes committed by criminal aliens.”

But the launch almost immediately ran into trouble, proving that scapegoating the country’s immigrant community to feed into the fear of a lost America is not easy work — especially for an administration that can’t seem to stay out of its own way.

The highly publicized VOICE announcement had elements to appease any Trump supporter who might believe that the nation has been (and continues to be) overrun by dangerous immigrants. There were shiny technological resources and a perfectly crafted quote from Department of Homeland Secretary John F. Kelly to sympathize with victims of immigrant crime (a number much lower than victims of nonimmigrant crime, which Kelly conveniently ignored).

[Crime stats should inform the public. Trump is misusing them to scare us instead.]

One of those resources, ICE’s victims hotline, was already brilliantly trolled by the Internet, with people reporting extraterrestrials as “criminal aliens.” The other one, an online database called the DHS-Victim Information and Notification Exchange (DHS-VINE) that would “help victims track the immigration custody status of illegal alien perpetrators of crime,” still cannot accurately reflect why it was created in the first place by President Trump’s Jan. 25 executive order. Last Wednesday, the first day VOICE was operational, DHS-VINE’s “illegal alien perpetrators of crime” included minors, with children as young as 2 years old.

Even Trump hasn’t classified Salvadoran toddlers as dangerous public safety threats, but that is exactly what the new database was showing. One search result, for example, showed as many as 10 minors for every 40 detainees listed. The new “illegal alien perpetrators of crime” terrorizing American victims were still using pacifiers.

When alerted of this discovery, DHS quickly went into damage control, admitting that a mistake was made and that it was fixing it.

Sure enough, minors’ names are no longer on the database, but the DHS-VINE portal is still publishing a rather substantial list of detained immigrants with no context. For pages and pages of search results, all it displays are the full names and ages of people along with their countries of origin, where they are being detained or when they got released. The system never shows the actual crimes against victims these people allegedly committed.

The release demonstrates “reckless incompetence on the part of the Trump administration,” immigration attorney Bryan Johnson told the Los Angeles Times.

Immigration attorneys who dedicate themselves to saving the lives of asylum seekers are also worried that the DHS-VINE database includes the names of their clients — people fleeing violence in countries like El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala or places where terrorist organizations operate, such as Pakistan or Somalia. The asylum issue is critical, not only because the government’s privacy policy prohibits it from sharing the names of asylum-seekers to third parties, but because now anyone in the world can search ICE data by name and country of origin. Someone who might want to threaten an asylum seeker’s family back home can easily do it, because DHS-VINE has made the names of all ICE detainees over 18 publicly searchable.

One immigration attorney told me of a client who is seeking asylum from Pakistan after working for a U.S. company there. She left the country, and soon a terrorist organization started threatening her family, forcing them to flee the country as well. It is quite possible, according to several immigration attorneys, that some asylum seekers are listed in the DHS-VINE database, even though an ICE official insisted that “no asylum-related information is disclosed in VINE.” The database still lists family detention centers, though, which are housing asylum seekers.

[There’s a federal database of undocumented immigrants like me. Don’t let Trump get it.]

There’s nothing surprising about the fact that ICE can’t get a clear handle on what the new office is doing. The push to promote a racialized narrative of hysterical immigrant criminality has never been grounded in fact to begin with.

Take, for example, another failure: ICE’s Declined Detainer Outcome Reports, which launched in late March and were the topic of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s March 27 appearance at the White House press briefing, the first briefing after Trump lost his first health-care bill fight. With all the rhetoric from Sessions about how cities were being overrun by immigrant gangs, only 44 percent of individuals in the first ICE report had criminal convictions, while 56 percent were people who were just charged with a crime. The most common convicted crime was driving under the influence and the most common charge crime was assault. There was only one conviction for rape and one charge for homicide. Minor crimes such as “traffic offense” and “liquor” were also listed. There was no mention of gang-related violence in any of the sample crimes.

The report, which tried to explain which jurisdictions were not complying with ICE requests to keep detained immigrants in custody so that DHS could begin removal proceedings and also listed sample crimes of the people released, was unclear and confusing from the very beginning, just like the VINE database.

ICE’s second and third reports published even fewer declined detainers and even fewer sample crimes, and when jurisdictions began to complain that the reports contained factual errors, ICE decided to suspend the reports, just three weeks after it began publishing them. Never mind the fact that ICE also disclosed that most of the people it arrested in its February removal enforcement efforts don’t even have criminal convictions, a tactic that has been going on for years.

“We’ve identified that there have been some data-processing errors,” DHS spokesman David Lapan told The Washington Postlast month. “That’s why the decision was made: Let’s take a pause and make sure that we look at this holistically and make sure that we’re getting it as accurate as possible.”

“Take a pause” should become the new mantra for DHS and ICE, since their incompetence to responsibly inform the public is clearly showing, and that type of attitude only leads to misinforming the country into believing that criminal immigrants are everywhere, when in fact, they are not.

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