Drew Harwell , The Washington Post; He made a fake ICE deportation tip line. Then a kindergarten teacher called.
A Nashville comedian’s deportation hotline, set up as a joke, has gone viral among viewers who say it shows the “banality of evil personified.”
"Ben Palmer, a stand-up comic in Nashville, has built a following online with his signature style of elaborate deadpan pranks, stumbling his way onto court TV shows and pyramid-scheme calls to poke fun at the latent absurdities of American life.
Then in January of last year, he had an idea for a new bit: He’d set up a fake tip line that people could use to report anyone they thought was an undocumented immigrant. It was darker than his other stunts, but it felt topical, the kind of challenge he wanted to try. At the very least, he thought, he might get a few calls he could talk about at his next show.
Instead, his tip line has received nearly 100 submissions from across the country: people reporting their neighbors, ex-lovers, Uber drivers, strangers they saw at the grocery store. One tip came from a teacher reporting the parents of a kindergarten student at her school.
"I mean, they seem like nice people or whatever,” the woman told Palmer on the call. “But if they’re taking up resources from our county, I’m not into illegal people being here.”...
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said it was “aware of a fraudulent YouTube page falsely representing ICE” and that the agency “strongly [condemns] any actions intended to mislead the public or impersonate official government entities.
But neither Palmer nor the websites claim to represent a government agency, and the sites’ privacy policies include disclaimers at the bottom saying they’re intended only for “parody, joke purposes and sociological research.” (Palmer spoke on the condition that The Washington Post not name the websites, so as not to ruin the bit.)"
