In April, the Trump Administration launched what it called the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) hotline, with a stated mission to ”provide proactive, timely, adequate, and professional services to victims of crimes committed by removable aliens." But internal logs of calls to VOICE obtained by Splinter show that hundreds of Americans seized on the hotline to lodge secret accusations against acquaintances, neighbors, or even their own family members, often to advance petty personal grievances.
The logs—hundreds of which were available for download on the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement web site despite containing extremely sensitive personal information—call to mind the efforts of closed societies like East Germany or Cuba to cultivate vast networks of informants and an atmosphere of fear and suspicion.
The reports rarely involve the sort of dangerous criminality that Donald Trump campaigned against. Despite the VOICE office's statement that the service ”is not a hotline to report crime," callers are using it to alert Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to minor infractions, or merely to the presence of people they suspect of being undocumented immigrants.
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The summaries are drawn from two spreadsheets documenting incoming calls to the VOICE hotline. The first, provided to Splinter by ICE in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, covers the first two weeks of the hotline's operation in April. It was redacted by ICE to protect the privacy of callers and subjects.
But after conducting Google searches for some data in that spreadsheet, including local police report numbers provided by callers, we were able to find a second spreadsheet, covering April to mid-August, hosted on the ICE web site. That spreadsheet appears to have been partially redacted to prepare it for release under the FOIA, but two columns containing intimate personal details—names, cell phone numbers, alleged crimes, addresses, and Social Security numbers—of both callers and the alleged undocumented immigrants they were calling about remained completely unredacted and publicly available. In several cases, the details would make it possible for people to figure out who informed on them.
Brendan Raedy, an ICE spokesperson, declined a request to speak on the phone about the logs or the publication of private data. In response to a series of emailed questions, he wrote only: ”It's important to know that ICE/VOICE is not using victim personal information to develop leads for immigration enforcement. Callers are not even asked for their status. Information is shared with Victim Assistance Specialists to help when and where they can."
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Publicly, the VOICE hotline is not supposed to be a crime-reporting tool at all, but a means of connecting victims and witnesses in existing cases with support services and with more information about the people accused. But internal training materials for the hotline, obtained by Splinter, contradict that mission statement, saying that the hotline ”will provide a means for persons to report suspected criminal activity."
Callers were often referred to the Homeland Security Investigations tipline. In several cases, VOICE employees contacted a field office to relay information gleaned from the calls, records show.
