Nolan writes in The Hill:
“The VOICE office will create a programmatic liaison between ICE and victims of crimes committed by removable aliens. The objective is to facilitate engagement with the victims and their families to ensure, to the extent permitted by law, that they are provided with information about the offender, including the offender’s immigration status and custody status.
Secretary Kelly funds this program by ordering the director of ICE to reallocate the resources currently used to advocate on behalf of undocumented aliens (except to comply with a judicial order) to the new VOICE Office, and to terminate outreach and advocacy services to undocumented aliens immediately.
VOICE is not a completely new idea. ICE established a Victim Assistance Program in 2008, but it has worked primarily with victims of human trafficking.
A Huffington Post contributor says, “Let’s call this what it is: VOICE is racist government propaganda.” He claims that VOICE will embroil the media and the public in a constant debate about the merits of immigration in the United States.
Even if the contributor is right about President Trump’s intention in creating this program, and I do not think he is, I applaud the president’s attempt to help crime victims.
Moreover, I believe that the public is entitled to more information about crimes committed by immigrants, particularly the ones who are here in violation of our immigration laws. Then, we will be able to let the facts speak for themselves.”
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Nolan informs me that his article made “The Hill’s Top Five Hit Parade.” Congratulations to Nolan, and many thanks for his timely and highly readable scholarship on immigration and politics.
Note that to fund VOICE, DHS will terminate all outreach programs aimed at assisting undocumented individuals involved in various DHS processes.
PWS
03/01/17
The VOICE program is the most disgusting, misplaced priority and it astonishes me how anyone with any understanding of the important resources cancelled in eliminating the VAWA and other critical supportive programs previously part of DHS’s portfolio can honestly praise its introduction. There are adequate local police programs to support all victims of crime, and elevating such a federal program erroneously propagates the destructive misconception that immigrants are mostly criminals. In fact, the crime rate among immigrants is extremely low, and lower than that in other communities.
Sent from my iPhone
Lory D. Rosenberg, Esq.
IDEAS consultation and Coaching
Empowering Strategies for Successful Immigration Attorneys
Thanks Lory. Indeed. See
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/trumps-speech-highlighted-victims-crimes-161511015.html
Trump’s Executive Order/travel ban and his contention that immigrants are dangerous is sheer nonsense demagoguery. And “law and order” politicians ranting against immigrant criminals are like the bigots who created the “blood libel” against Jews and brought us the Holocaust.
Compared to the threat posed by refugee terrorists — which the president’s executive order is allegedly designed to curtail — the data suggest the typical American, over the course of a lifetime, is:
6 times more likely to die from a shark attack (one of the rarest forms of death on Earth)
29 times more likely to die from a regional asteroid strike
260 times more likely to be struck and killed by lightning
4,700 times more likely to die in an airplane or spaceship accident
129,000 times more likely to die in a gun assault
407,000 times more likely to die in a motor vehicle incident
6.9 million times more likely to die from cancer or heart disease
Put another way, as frightening and disturbing as events like 9/11 are, an American’s unfathomably remote chances of winning the Powerball lottery jackpot are many times greater than those of being killed by a refugee terrorist on any given year — and even higher compared to the odds of being killed by an illegal immigrant terrorist.
G [:-{|))>
Lory posted her detailed response on her blog Appeal Matters, and I reposted it here
Best,
P
Thanks Gus. I wish I had had those statistics when I met with the Families of 9/11 victims as an immigration counsel for the House Judiciary Committee. It would have been a great comfort to them.
Gus’ attitude towards the lives of 9/11 victims is reflected in his views on VOICE too. He doesn’t want the victims of criminal aliens to be fussed over either.
In any case, what do these statistics have to do with collecting and distributing data on the harm that criminal aliens are doing?
I respond to Lory’s criticism of my article in her blog section, so I won’t repeat my comments here. But I can restate my main point in a single sentence here.
If crimes that removable aliens commit are as uncommon as Lory and Gus claim, why are they resisting the collection and distribution of factual data that should support their claim?