Ex-ICE Director: ‘I Would Rather Put an Illegal Alien in Jail for DUI Than White-Collar Bank Fraud’

Talk about saying the quiet part loud.

Former ICE director Tom Homan appeared on Laura Ingraham’s The Ingraham Angle Tuesday night, where he promptly and clearly made known that he would much rather throw poor undocumented immigrants in the clink for drunk driving than for anything more complicated:

| “Ten thousand people a year die from DUIs, twenty-eight people a day die from DUIs. I’d rather put an illegal alien in jail for DUI than white-collar bank fraud.” |

A lot to unpack there.

First, of those 10,000 deaths from DUI every year, how many are caused by undocumented immigrants? Anti-immigration hardliners like to point to individual cases, which are no doubt tragic. But a recent study showed that areas with heavy undocumented populations actually have shown a decrease in “drug-related crimes,” one of which is DUI. It seems death and injury from DUIs committed by American citizens is a vastly bigger problem, which one would think would interest a law enforcement officer.

Second, it’s a lot easier to bust someone for DUI than for white-collar bank fraud. The cases are much less complex for prosecutors. There are multiple types of bank fraud, but overall it is a crime that is committed in disproportionately higher numbers by citizens, for obvious reasons of educational attainment and opportunity.

Homan claims he’s focused on DUI prosecutions because of the public-safety issue. Really, though, it is just an easier issue with which law enforcement can bully vulnerable populations instead of the high-income white-collar workers who are more likely to commit bank fraud or illegally hire undocumented immigrants to, say, work at their golf clubs.

Watch the entire video at the top of this post.