Nashville comic’s fake ICE tip line exposes teachers reporting kids

> 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. > After reading dozens of reports, he said he was stunned by how many people seemed driven by personal annoyance. One woman reported the new girlfriend of her ex-husband. Another person reported his neighbor for using his trash can. > In the kindergarten call, the teacher said she’d decided to report the student’s parents after looking them up in school files and seeing that they were born in Honduras and El Salvador. She said the student was born in New York and was 5 or 6 years old, but that she didn’t like people “taking up resources from our country.” > > When Palmer read the caller’s report back to her in a flat tone, she scoffed. “You make it sound terrible,” she said. Later in the call, she asked to speak to Palmer’s supervisor after saying she didn’t like his attitude. > > “I can’t help that they have a 6-year-old. That’s on them,” she said. > Palmer has not traditionally performed political comedy in his live shows, where the crowd sometimes skews conservative and he tries not to lean “one way or the other.” But he said he has struggled to come to grips with what the calls have shown him: ordinary people who, while going about their daily business, decided to potentially upend a stranger’s life.