White House Launches 'VOICE' Office To Report Undocumented Immigrant Crimes

AUSTIN, TX — As it relates to painting undocumented immigrants as a national threat intent on criminality, the White House just did a "take two" on Wednesday.

After a failed roll-out of error-ridden White House-issued lists purporting to single out more than 100 jurisdictions deemed as non-cooperative of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — including Travis and Williamson counties — the White House on Wednesday launched a new hotline ostensibly to report victimization at the hands of undocumented immigrants.

Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly on Wednesday announced the launch of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement Office (VOICE). The VOICE system is designed to assist victims of crimes committed by criminal aliens, a news advisory alerted.

Kelly noted ICE built the VOICE office in response to Donald Trump's executive order titled Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States, which directed DHS to create an office to support victims of crimes committed by "criminal aliens," he explained in a press release.

“All crime is terrible, but these victims are unique—and too often ignored,” Kelly said in a prepared statement. “They are casualties of crimes that should never have taken place—because the people who victimized them often times should not have been in the country in the first place."

Kelly outlined the key objectives of VOICE:

Use of a victim-centered approach to acknowledge and support victims and their families.

Promoting awareness of available services to crime victims.

Building collaborative partnerships with community stakeholders assisting victims.

There's a hotline, too, designed to report crimes by criminal undocumented immigrants directly to the White House, "...staffed with operators who will triage calls to ensure victims receive the support they need," Kelly explained. The number is 1-855-48-VOICE or (855) 488-6423.

"ICE is employing a measured approach to building the VOICE office—meaning that it intends to expand the services VOICE offers in the future," Kelly's advisory reads. "This approach allows the office to provide immediate services to victims, but will also allow the agency to collect metrics and information to determine additional resource needs and how the office can best serve victims and their families moving forward."

The move comes in the wake of the White House's decision earlier this month to pull lists it began publishing purporting to detail release of detained undocumented immigrants that had been wanted by ICE. But the roll-out of the lists was short-lived after complaints they were riddled with errors and mistakes in categorization.

In Travis County and its county seat of Austin, law enforcement officials were among those complaining of the erroneous listings. The area has emerged as a hotbed of ICE activity amid a Trump-ordered crackdown on immigration.

After appearing prominently on the lists as being largely non-compliant with ICE, the Travis County Sheriff's Office challenged the Feds' assertion. Some of the listings purporting to show non-compliance with ICE, for example, predated the federal agency's revamped policy—with the effect of illustrating wholesale non-compliance—the office said.

Related stories:

Travis, Williamson County Officials Dispute DHS Report On Immigration Detention Requests

Feds Say Travis County Rejected Most ICE Immigration Detention Requests

"Our agency’s new ICE policy went into effect February 1, 2017," TCSO officials said at the time. "On that date, we not only applied the policy to new and subsequent arrestees, we also re-assessed the detainer requests on all inmates in our custody at that time, some of whom had been there for many months."

What's more: "If their charges or prior convictions noted through criminal history check did not qualify for us to honor the detainer request under the new policy, we refused those detainers on that date," the sheriff's office said.

Officials in neighboring Williamson County also took issue with the White House lists in challenging their accuracy.

"This report is misleading and lists Williamson County Jail as an agency that refused to cooperate with federal requests to detain undocumented immigrants," officials said in a prepared statement. "Williamson County Sheriff's Office honors all ICE detainers placed on individuals and will continue to do so."

Other municipalities throughout the country pointed out inaccuracies in the short-lived lists, prompting the White House to discontinue their use. In Kansas, for instance, five counties appeared on the lists before their claims were challenged by law enforcement authorities there.

Tony Wilhite, undersheriff for Butler County in Kansas, detailed for the Wichita Eagle newspaper the layered nature of inaccuracies found on the since-aborted White House lists. Given their questionable assertions, the lists are “something that has been made up by others to inflame people, but there’s nothing to it," Whihite told the newspaper.

Wihlite noted the protocol his county had been using is the same process applied to anyone arrested, but the White House lists made it appear as if allowances were being made for undocumented immigrants: “If I go out and arrest a guy walking down the street and take him to jail, the jail is going to ask me, what are the charges? Do I have warrant? Do I have probable cause,” Wilhite said. “And if I say, ‘not really, why don’t you give me a couple of days to figure something out,’ you can’t do that.”

Ultimately, the flood of complaints from jurisdictions throughout the country proved too much, and ICE quietly ended the practice of publishing them by mid-April.

“ICE remains committed to publishing the most accurate information available regarding declined detainers across the country and continues to analyze and refine its reporting methodologies,” an ICE statement read. “While this analysis is ongoing, the publication of the Declined Detainer Outcome Report (DDOR) will be temporarily suspended.”

But now, there's VOICE, through which citizens can report crimes by undocumented immigrants. Yet Wednesday's news advisory detailing the new service doesn't make clear if there are any safeguards to ensure the accuracy of those complaints.

While anti-immigration politicians are quick to latch onto instances of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants (as Trump did to great effect during his campaign), such incidences are exceedingly rare. Several studies, over many years, have concluded that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States, the New York Times reported, rendering available evidence as non-supportive of the notion that undocumented immigrants commit a disproportionate share of crime.

Mark Twain once famously observed that "There's lies, there's damn lies, and then there's statistics," suggesting the ease of extrapolating data to use it as basis for disparate arguments. But in the case of stats purporting to illustrate crimes by undocumented immigrants, experts say available hard data doesn't yield such malleability.

“There’s no way I can mess with the numbers to get a different conclusion,” Alex Nowrasteh, immigration policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, which advocates more liberal immigration laws, told the Times.

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