While it may be years until the legacy of the Trump presidency is clearly defined, the administration’s immigration policies will certainly play a significant role in determining how history will ultimately view the 45th President of the United States. As a candidate, Donald Trump traded nuance for hardline stances on the construction of a border wall, increased deportations, and extreme vetting of refugees. Once inaugurated, he placed immigration at the forefront of his policy agenda with several high profile executive order signing events in the opening days of his presidency. Regardless of the eventual success or failure of the implementation of the Trump immigration policy plan, his often boisterous rhetoric on immigration will leave an indelible mark on his page of history.
While much of the attention will be paid to the most controversial and highest profile provisions of the Trump immigration platform, the creation of a powerful political weapon has gone largely unnoticed in the deluge of Executive Orders that characterized the Trump Administration’s opening days. Although primarily a policy statement regarding immigration enforcement and sanctions against sanctuary jurisdictions, a small section in Executive Order 13768 created a new federal program that focuses solely on crimes committed by aliens who are also subject to removal from the United States. Named in the E.O. as the Office for Victims of Crimes Committed by Removable Aliens, and later rebranded by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as Victim of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE), the program operates with two mandates. VOICE provides victim services in those instances in which a crime is committed by a removable alien and creates quarterly reports on the effects of crimes committed by removable aliens.
The political usefulness of the VOICE program begins with the suggestion that such an office is even necessary. VOICE is a redundancy of not only the Office of Victims of Crime, which has existed under the Department of Justice since 1988, but also established crime victim programs in all 50 states, all of which provide the same types of victim services regardless of the immigration status of the offender. Creating a new program specific to removable alien offenders serves to draw increased attention to criminal aliens in a political environment in which even anecdotal evidence is sufficient imagery to support calls for increased immigration enforcement in furtherance of the overall Trump immigration policy agenda.
The VOICE victim advocacy mission includes providing the immigration status of specific individuals, information which was previously protected from disclosure as personally identifiable information under federal privacy laws. E.O. 13768 dispenses with those protections by commanding agencies to exclude all non-citizens from privacy policies. The directive does not limit the removal of those protections to the provision of victim services, but is rather a blanket statement of policy. Wholesale removal of Privacy Act protections provides pathways to publically disclosing personal identity information of all aliens, whether or not they are subject to removal. Until legally challenged, this provision of E.O. 13768 grants the administration complete discretion to utilize personally identifiable information to meet both operational and political goals.
Perhaps the most politically important aspect of the VOICE program, however, has little to do with providing services to crime victims. Quarterly reporting of immigrant crime statistics will create a body of data critical to garnering support for increased immigration enforcement. Over time, data trends can be utilized to highlight successes in reducing crimes committed by removable aliens. Conversely, the data can be used to bolster arguments for increased immigration enforcement, much in the same way law enforcement agencies utilize crime data for operational planning, budgeting, and lobbying for resources. These reporting requirements represent a second redundancy within the VOICE program, as the Federal Bureau of Investigation has compiled and published national crime statistics since the 1930s. Utilizing a government agency to gather and disseminate data lends an inherent sense of legitimacy to the reporting, adding political potency to the information when it is inevitably used to further a policy agenda or campaign for public office.
The pursuit of efficiency in government would suggest that the goals of the VOICE program could be easily accomplished through the established infrastructure of existing government programs. That logic, however, requires suspending the reality that public administration and public policy are inseparably intertwined with politics. VOICE is an excellent example of leveraging public resources for political gains, with any public service impact a secondary consequence. The creation of the VOICE program was not simply politics over efficiency in government, however, as the Trump administration has also identified reducing government overreach and inefficiency as priorities. Here we see competing political goals within the administration and the ensuing public policy a product of that conflict. The politics of public policy often requires the interruption of one initiative in favor of another, even within the same policy platform.
Mark,
I have to say when reading this the thoughts that came to mind were answered or written by you in the next paragraph. I agree with you that it seems that VOICE was created in my opinion as a tool for President Trump to use in the future to show success of his immigration policy. While I read this as well, it came to my mind several times that is this not a form of racial bias as well. In other words, we do have systems already in place to help victims of crimes. Does it really matter to a victim whether I commit the crime or an illegal alien commits the crime? I would believe it to be hard to find someone to say yes it does matter. This seems to be an attempt to garner support and ultimately financial support for programs as you stated such as the wall between the United States and Mexico or the complete immigration travel ban that President Trump is finding hard pressed to gain support on it being legal and put in place.
Your examples in the article are excellent with the facts that we already have this data in place. If we did not then how in the first place would President Trump know that amount of illegal aliens that commit crimes in this country requires greater restrictions and laws because they commit more crimes than anyone else in the country. Is there really any proof to this? Does the issue need to be looked at as illegal aliens versus legal immigration? As I stated previously and your comments, this is nothing more than the highest office of Public Administration exerting itself in Public Policy for political gain. I can picture the stats now being shown in a political ad in 2020. With all of this said, I do believe that there is a problem with immigration and it does need to be looked at heavily for reform but I also believe that the problem is not those that enter the US legally but in fact the illegal aliens that are in the country. However, we have the offices in place and why spend more money to create another office such as VOICE to do the same thing that is already in place. An outright ban though and revoking visas is not the way to do it though because in my current position, I have seen several very good Doctors in Atlanta save lives and they started out on a student visa. In closing, why punish everyone because of a select few individuals? As well, why create an office to do what is already being done? Could it be that as stated this is for political gain because will those that work for VOICE be open in their reporting or bias to numbers that the President needs for political gain? Finally, with regards to the privacy of this information, I strongly believe the information needs to remain private and used by those who need the data in order to not cause racial bias in this country. One can only look at what happened to the Muslims in this country after the attacks of 9/11, when it was truly radicals that attacked this country and used religion as a means to justify their actions.