Note: Biased headline is biased.A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) program launched under Barack Obama to build trust with community groups has been reconfigured to focus on assisting victims of crimes committed by immigrants.
Twenty-one employees hired and trained to work in community outreach have been assigned to work under President Donald Trump’s new Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) Office, which was established in his Jan. 25 executive order on immigration.
The VOICE office provides services to help people track “removable criminal aliens,” a broad designation that could potentially apply to any immigrant eligible for deportation under federal law. The office is also tasked with publishing a quarterly report studying the effects of crimes committed by immigrants, and building partnerships with groups that assist people affected by immigration crime.
“They are being used to carry out responsibilities that they were not hired for,” Sarah Saldaña, the director of ICE from 2014 to early 2017, told Foreign Policy, adding that the original focus of the program “has been subverted to a focus that’s just political.”
The shift is another example of the Trump administration’s turn away from Obama-era policies, according to critics, who see the change as highlighting the agenda of Trump’s chief advisor, Stephen Bannon, and anti-immigration groups like NumbersUSA, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and the Center for Immigration Studies.
Saldaña, a political appointee under Obama, oversaw the expansion of ICE’s small community relations program in 2016. The initiative trained and placed a community relations officer in most of the agency’s regional hubs. The community outreach position was intended to serve as a point person to communicate about immigration enforcement, clarify specific raids and deportations, and explain ICE’s priorities.
More:
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/08/dial-one-if-your-neighbors-gardener-looks-mexican-ice-victims-immigrant-crime/
