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Prank Calls Brought ICE Hotline To a Standstill, Internal Emails Show (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: When ICE launched an immigration crime hotline last year, the Trump administration pitched it as a way to provide resources to victims, but activists saw something else: an attack on the immigrant community. The hotline was part of the Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) Office, an outfit established in February 2017. When the office first launched a line for its services the following April, protestors flooded the hotline to call in pranks and slow down response times. The plan picked up even more steam as the protestors shared the hotline number online, encouraging others to call in with fake tips.
According to internal emails and documents obtained by The Verge under the Freedom of Information Act, prank calls fully upended the system, leaving operators unable to answer more than 98 percent of incoming calls during the protest as the media relations team attempted to contain the narrative. In reports and emails produced in the first days of operation, ICE officials described an "overwhelming" amount of calls. The day after the launch, the office received more than 16,400. Of those, only a little more than 2,100 were placed into a queue, and only 260 answered. Callers in the queue waited as long as 79 minutes to reach an operator. An official noted that, should the rate of calls continue, they would need an additional 400 operators to field the hotline.
According to internal emails and documents obtained by The Verge under the Freedom of Information Act, prank calls fully upended the system, leaving operators unable to answer more than 98 percent of incoming calls during the protest as the media relations team attempted to contain the narrative. In reports and emails produced in the first days of operation, ICE officials described an "overwhelming" amount of calls. The day after the launch, the office received more than 16,400. Of those, only a little more than 2,100 were placed into a queue, and only 260 answered. Callers in the queue waited as long as 79 minutes to reach an operator. An official noted that, should the rate of calls continue, they would need an additional 400 operators to field the hotline.
Who is advocating wide open borders? The only time I ever see it mentioned is on Fox News or at a Trump rally.
The liberals simply want to see people treated respectfully.
I've spent a few months in Mexico.. I'd take the average Mexican laborer over the average American laborer every day. They are willing to work harder for less pay and no bitching. Business owners secretly want this as well and this is why massive immigration reform never seems to get done.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Oh, citations:
https://twitter.com/banditelli...
https://thehill.com/opinion/im... (this article quotes Keith Ellison repeatedly)
Only two, I know. Like an iceberg...
Then the implied and explicit support for open borders:
https://theweek.com/articles/7... ( Zack Beauchamp exchange with a reader, Tom Stephenson, and later Zach states explicitly he is an open borders supporter)
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/1... (Hillary Clinton 'dreamed of “open trade and open borders” throughout the Western Hemisphere.')
Hillary seems pretty mainstream Democrat unless you're trying to hide the details.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
...what has happened so fundamentally in our country (US) where people don't care about actual citizenship, and protecting our borders?
Let me give you a liberal perspective on this: you are raising a straw man. We have no problem with protecting the border, the problem we have is with using scapegoating and scare-mongering, and bullshit waste of resources like building a wall. If you want to see the source of our problems, it's rich guys buying politicians, not Mexicans sneaking across the border to pick crops.
If you are here in this country illegally, you have criminally trespassed. You should be deported.
No, "trespass" has a specific meaning in law, and an unauthorized crossing of the border does not match that, even if it feels like tresspassing. And even as it were, the law allows people to enter your land against your wishes under certain circumstances. If a neighbor goes on your posted land to hunt, that's trespass. If he goes onto your posted land to escape a home invader, it's not trespass.
Treaties the US imposed on other people after WW2 also bind us when it comes to handling asylum seekers. We don't have to help them get here, but we do have to give them due process and administrative help when they get here, even if they sneak across our borders. It's actually the government that is breaking the law by turning asylum seekers away at the border without a hearing, which of course means they sneak across, which makes policing the border that much harder.
But I just don't get these seemingly increasing number of folks in the US promoting full blown open borders, with no control of who gets in here.
That was how we did immigration up until 1927. You showed up at Ellis Island, were checked for disease, promised you weren't an anarchist and they'd ship you over to the docks at Battery Park and let you go anywhere you wanted. The 1927 quotas were proposed by eugenicists, who were worried that the influx of Jews was lowering America's collective IQ.
Now if you were Mexican, you weren't part of the quota system. You could still walk across the border until 1965. That was because business interests needed the cheap labor. What changed in 65 was the rise of the United Farm Workers. Now this *might* just be coincidence, but if you look at how the'65 restrictions were enforced, they did not stem the influx of immigrants, so much as put those immigrants outside the protection of the law and made it harder for them to organize. The government didn't go after farmers hiring Mexicans, they went after the Mexicans. And the Mexicans they deported would be immediately replaced by other Mexicans, because there was a job waiting for them.
Now restrictions on employers have become stricter, but we still have a system which is dependent upon immigrant labor, but puts those laborers outside the protection of the law. That's the problem with the tip line; it's a tool for payback against people with no rights of due process. This is the problem of immigration in the US: the hypocrisy of the whole system corrupts things that would otherwise be a good idea.
What good does building a wall do if you can just pay someone to wave you through? And yet the demand for immigration security theater has the agency relaxing screening standards that are supposed to catch cartel infiltrators, in an agency that already has a stunning 5% corruption rate. Immigration security theater undermines national security.
Now change the immigration so it allows for the immigrant laborers we actually need and keeps the people who've been here for years peacefully
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