On Friday, as Joe Biden bumbled his way around the G7 Summit, his administration was hard at work disassembling more Trump-era immigration policies.
During his first week in office, President Trump created the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement Office (VOICE) within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). For the first time, victims of crimes committed by illegal aliens were given the acknowledgment and support they deserved.
That support has now come to a screeching halt with the closing of VOICE.
According to the AP, VOICE is to be replaced by the newly created Victims Engagement and Services Line (VESL). VESL’s focus is to provide “methods for people to report abuse and mistreatment in immigration detention centers and a notification system for lawyers and others with a vested interest in immigration cases.”
In other words, instead of VOICE focusing on support for the victims of illegal aliens, VESL will now support the illegal aliens themselves.
Former Trump senior advisor Stephen Miller tweeted his apparent disgust at the announcement:
This is in addition to all of the free help illegal aliens already get from mega-billionaires, the ACLU & powerful special interests. Americans have become second-class citizens in their own country. And grief-stricken families, mourning loved ones, are the collateral damage. 2/2
— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) June 11, 2021
With this repugnant refocus, not only has Biden taken away support specific to illegal alien crime victims, but he has also removed the explicit acknowledgment that they’re victims of criminals who shouldn’t even have been in the U.S. in order to commit the crimes in the first place.
As is to be expected, this change in focus is couched in leftist faux compassion and inclusivity for all victims nonsense:
Providing assistance to society’s most vulnerable is a core American value. All people, regardless of their immigration status, should be able to access victim services without fear, said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
And while on paper it may seem compassionate and inclusive, it is actually abusive and divisive. Imagine how victims of illegal alien crime will feel knowing VESL includes support for some of the very perpetrators of the crimes against them. How many victims will now choose not to come forward?
On Twitter, Jon Feere, a former senior Trump administration advisor and current director of investigations at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), raised an interesting question:
Here's an ICE fact sheet on the VOICE Office. It's quite unbelievable that the Biden admin has such a negative view of victims that it doesn't want to continue offering this support. pic.twitter.com/P0ydVGgQkC
— Jon Feere (@JonFeere) June 11, 2021
One really does have to wonder why Biden wouldn’t want “crime victims and their families who have been impacted by crimes committed by removable criminal aliens” to have access to all the support and services they need.
Why is Biden prioritizing the needs of criminal aliens over citizen victims?
Perhaps Biden should ask the families of victims of illegal alien crime—like Kate Steinle, Ian Eckles, Karen Ruiz, Elizabeth Tornabene and her sister, Madisyn White, Rocky Jones, Mollie Tibbetts, Juan Carlos Con Guzman and countless others across the nation—how they feel about his so-called compassion and inclusivity.