Immigrant crime hotline released callers’ info
PHOENIX – The same week the Trump administration opened a hotline in April to support victims of crimes by immigrants, Elena Maria Lopez called to report a complaint against her ex-husband.
At first, Lopez kept getting a busy signal.
Finally someone answered. For the next 20 minutes, Lopez provided a detailed account, accusing a Dutch immigrant of marrying her to get a green card, then threatening to harm her if she contacted immigration officials.
What happened next shocked Lopez. Not only did Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency that operates the hotline, decline to take action, but immigration authorities also released much of the private information she provided.
This included a confidential Internet phone number she fears will make it easier for anyone to locate her in New Jersey, where she has a protected address set up for domestic-violence victims.
Lopez is one of hundreds of people whose private information was inappropriately released by ICE when the agency posted call logs to the hotline on its website, a violation of the agency’s own policies against divulging private information, as well as privacy laws intended to protect individuals who provide sensitive information to the government.
The agency released some of the same information to The Arizona Re
public, part of the USA TODAY NETWORK, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
Lopez contacted the newspaper after ICE officials notified her through telephone calls and emails that private information she provided in confidence was inadvertently released to the newspaper.
“I was very upset because I do my best to protect my privacy for my safety, and I was especially upset that it was the Department of Homeland Security that gave out my personal information,” she said. “The same agency that claimed it had to protect my ex-husband’s rights just destroyed my privacy and my safety.” ‘This is a serious problem’
The agency’s release of private information underscores problems that have surfaced since ICE launched the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement office, or VOICE, to “serve the needs of crime victims and their families who have been affected by crimes committed by individuals with a nexus to immigration.”
The office includes a telephone hotline that was intended to “answer questions from victims,” according to the VOICE website.
Instead, callers have treated it as a crime hotline, using it largely to accuse people of being in the country illegally or of violating immigration laws, according to telephone logs the agency released The Republic.
“This is a serious problem and obviously will further discourage people from attempting to interact in any way with the federal government on immigration matters,” said immigration policy analyst David Bier at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
Victims and witnesses of crimes are hesitant to provide information to the government because “having that infor- mation out in the public could pose a serious threat to them and to their family,” he said.
President Trump called for the creation of the VOICE program in an executive order on immigration in January 2016, which directed the Department of Homeland Security and ICE to take a tougher stance on illegal immigration and immigration law violators.
In a written statement, ICE officials admitted that the agency erred in divulging private information “protected by policy and law.”
“When the agency receives evidence suggesting that non-releasable information is unintentionally available, immediate actions are taken to ensure proper mitigation both to correct and to prevent further disclosures,” the statement said.
Those actions include temporarily removing and reviewing the entire contents of ICE’s Freedom of Information Act library, the statement said. The library contained thousands of pages of data and documents the agency had released in response to requests.
The contents of ICE’s Freedom of Information Act library were restored Oct. 16, the agency said.
The agency offered identity-threat monitoring services to people affected because of the improper disclosure of private information, the statement said.
Lopez said ICE offered her two years of identity-theft protection and credit monitoring.
“That does nothing for me,” she said. Lopez said she became hopeful when Trump said he was creating the VOICE office.
For more a decade, she said, she has tried unsuccessfully to get immigration authorities to investigate her ex-husband, Erik Niehof, a Dutch immigrant.
He disputes her allegations accusing him of marriage fraud and domestic violence. “Basically, this was just a marriage that ended up really bad, and ‘I am going to get back at you, and I am going to do that through immigration service,’ ” Niehof said. “This is her vengeance.”
In 2016, Niehof said, U.S. immigration officers briefly detained him when he returned from a vacation abroad after his immigration record was flagged because of his ex-wife’s allegations. While he waited, immigration officers looked into his record, then welcomed him back into the USA. He said that would not have happened if any of Lopez’s allegations were true.
“That is probably why (immigration authorities) haven’t made a case of this, because there is no validity in any of it,” he said. “She is out for vengeance.”
Motives questioned
Bier of the Cato Institute said he supports government efforts to provide more information about cases to crime victims, as well as informing them of other services available.
But the program’s problems and its narrow focus on victims of crimes committed by immigrants suggests the program has ulterior motives, he said.
“The administration says the motive of the program is to provide more information to crime victims,” Bier said. “I think if that was the case, it would apply to all crime victims, not just crime victims of immigrants. So I think the motivation is the effort to portray unauthorized immigrants, and immigrants more generally, as a threat or a potential threat to Americans rather than to actually provide meaningful aid to victims of crimes.”