Houston group inspires crime-victims office
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump started his campaign in 2015 with a warning about rapists and other criminals crossing the border: “When Mexico sends it people,” he said, “they’re not sending their best.”
On Wednesday, he made good on a promise he made to a Houston couple last year when they sought his help to aid the victims of criminals living in the U.S. illegally.
Tim Lyng and his wife, Maria Espinoza, founders of the Houston-based Remembrance Project, looked on as Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly announced the launch of the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement Office (VOICE), billed as an office to assist victims of “criminal aliens.”
A host of immigrant rights organizations immediately denounced the project as a dangerous effort to stigmatize immigrants as criminals to justify the administration’s aggressive new deportation policies, which have swept up a growing number of immigrants with no criminal records.
For Lyng and Espinoza, the new office represents
the culmination of nearly a decade of advocacy, including a March 2016 letter to Trump.
“It’s a very emotional time,” Espinoza said. “It’s just being able to breathe, and feel like someone is listening to the families. That’s all that we’re asking.”
Also present among a clutch of victim families was Laura Wilkerson, a Pearland woman whose teenage son Joshua was beaten and tortured to death in 2010 by a classmate, a Belize national living in the U.S. illegally.
“It means everything,” Wilkerson said. “What we started it for was to help victims when they needed it most. And there was no one, when it happened in my family, to turn or to get help for questions, like, who is this kid who killed him?” A humanitarian face
While the Trump initiative is aimed nationwide, the launch has deep roots in Houston, where it could have future political ramifications. Espinoza, the daughter of a Mexican immigrant who “came the right way,” is considering another Republican primary challenge to Houston U.S. Rep. John Culberson, architect of Trump’s sanctuary cities crackdown that was blocked Tuesday by a federal judge.
“It’s still there,” Espinoza said of a potential sequel to her unsuccessful 2016 run. “So, we’ll just see what happens.” In a threeway race, she came in third with nearly 18 percent of the vote.
Kelly, who a week ago said critics of Trump’s forceful immigration policies should “shut up” and get behind law enforcement, used Wednesday’s launch to blast what he called the past Obama administration’s “politically correct approach to public safety.”
The rollout came as the Trump administration has struggled to get Congress to appropriate money for the massive border wall he promised during his campaign.
Amid growing opposition among administration critics to Trump’s hard line on border security and immigration, Kelly sought to put a humanitarian face on the new initiative for crime victims.
“We’re giving people who were victimized by illegal aliens, for the first time, a voice of their own,” Kelly said. “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 oftentimes should not have been in the country in the first place.”
Civil rights activists argue that immigrants are no more likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans and that the VOICE initiative has more to do with the nativist theme of Trump’s presidential campaign than any humanitarian impulse.
“It couldn’t be more obnoxious,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice Education Fund, which raises awareness on immigration reform. “It’s the kind of thing you see in totalitarian societies when they’re trying to define a group in order to set up further persecution.” Effort is ‘misleading’
Other critics termed it an effort to scapegoat immigrants by playing on natural human sympathy.
“While we hold sympathy for all victims of crime and their families, especially when there’s been a loss of life, the agenda of the VOICE office established by President Trump is unduly selective in its focus, misleading in its framing of information, and, sadly, designed to stir up animus against the immigrant population,” said Ronald Newman, director of strategic initiatives for the American Civil Liberties Union. “Giving it a humanitarian frame is giving it too much credit.”
Though Kelly took no questions after the announcement, a Homeland Security spokesman said there was no effort to demonize immigrants through the office, which will offer an information hotline to connect crime victims and their families with Immigration and Customs Enforcement community relations officers.
“It’s to make sure that the victims and their families have a resource they can go to, to help them understand the immigration system, to get information that’s specific to the immigration system,” said David Lapan, a press aide to Kelly.
The reason for the inititative, Lapan added, is “not necessarily that there is more crime, but that there is crime committed by individuals that are here unlawfully.”
Of the estimated 11 million people living in the U.S. illegally, Lapan said, “not every one of those or nowhere near every one of those has committed crimes, outside of being here unlawfully. It’s that segment of the population that’s here illegally and is committing crimes that we’re concerned about.” Project’s political arm
Lyng and Espinoza started the Remembrance Project in 2009 after Houston police officer Henry Canales was shot and killed by an illegal immigrant during a sting operation against a stolen goods fencing ring. His death came three years after the 2006 fatal shooting of another Houston police officer, Rodney Johnson, also at the hands of a man in the country illegally. Johnson’s widow later brought suit against the city, blaming the death partly on local immigration enforcement policies.
Lyng and Espinoza, working with America First Latinos, first sought help from the nation’s governors to set up similar victims’ programs.
Getting no response, they then approached the four remaining candidates in last year’s Republican presidential primaries, including Sen. Ted Cruz.
According to Lyng, Trump was the only one who responded.
“He sent Maria a personal note saying he would support the Remembrance Project or a program to assist Americans whose loved ones were killed by illegal aliens, and that he would do that as soon as he’s elected,” Lyng said.
Espinoza, who attended the signing of Trump’s executive order cracking down on illegal immigration in January, said there is nothing racist or discriminatory about the Remembrance Project, several of whose members gave personal testimonials at the Republican National Convention last July.
“We’re talking about illegal immigration,” she said. “We’re importing crime. ... These crimes are all 100 percent preventable, and that’s what we’re focusing on. We’re talking about anyone who’s here illegally. It doesn’t matter what country you’re from or the color of your skin or your eyes.”
Though the Remembrance Project originally was set up as a nonprofit, Lyng and Espinoza recently met with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and set up an affiliated political advocacy organization.
“This will have more latitude in endorsing and supporting ‘America First’ policies and candidates around the country,” Espinoza said.