Homeland Security’s New Criminal ‘Alien’ Hotline Gets Taken Over and ICE Is Not Happy

Majority of Calls Are About Encounters of the ‘Third Kind’

On Wednesday the Trump administration launched its new hotline for people to report if they were victimized by criminal aliens, but immigration activists and fun-loving folks decided to put it to better use. 

The majority of calls within the first 24 hours of its launch are reporting encounters of the third kind – sightings of weird creatures, and other extraterrestrial phenomenon akin to episodes of the popular TV science fiction program, “The X Files.”

Officials are not amused, according to The Hill:

ICE denounced the calls, saying such actions hurt victims of real crimes. Callers have even mentioned spotting “muggle-borns,” a term from the “Harry Potter” book series referring to magical characters with non-magical parents. “Their actions seek to obstruct and do harm to crime victims; that’s objectively despicable regardless of one’s views on immigration policy,” an ICE official said.

Today’s launch came nearly two months after the President signed an executive order mandating the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) set up the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) Office to “assist victims of crimes committed by criminal aliens.” 

A spokesperson for ICE told NCRM that “alien” is a term used by the federal government to describe individuals who are not American citizens but who reside on U.S. soil. The official went on to explain that the term is generic, covering all non-U.S. citizens. In announcing the office during a press briefing, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly noted, “All crime is terrible, but these victims are unique — and too often ignored. 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.”

The hotline will also serve as a resource for “victims to receive public information,” another ICE official told The Atlantic.

While the hotline would be useful in assisting ICE’s efforts to gather data about undocumented people living in the U.S., should it receive accurate data input directly from callers, given the current trend and volume of calls that are mocking in nature, the ICE office told NCRM it’s not likely in the near term to be effective.

Trump’s migrant crime hotline is being used to report space aliens

 

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Image by el Neato via Flickr and a CC license