Merrick Garland Wants Banks to Give Loans to Illegal Immigrants
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Director Rohit Chopra want to force banks to loan money to illegal immigrants.
They said so in a statement last month.
U.S. Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN), U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and the other Republican members of the Senate Banking Committee wrote Garland and Chopra last week to state their formal objections.
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This practice, the senators said, contradicts long standing legal interpretations from federal regulators. Under these conditions, lenders might find themselves unable to recoup loan payments from deported illegal aliens. If financial institutions cannot use immigration status to assess risk then a significant number of loans could go into default and damage the U.S. economy.
“The CFPB and the Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s) joint directive not only flies in the face of responsible lending standards, risk-based pricing, and sound risk management, but also contradicts and rewrites decades worth of guidance from the CFPB and the federal banking regulators—all without an official rulemaking pursuant to the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), giving financial institutions the chance to comment, or even offering any other semblance of advanced notice,” the senators wrote.
“We are also concerned that the CFPB and DOJ’s joint statement appears to be at odds with the official guidelines for various federal lending programs, many of which require U.S. citizenship or permanent residency to qualify.”
At its most fundamental level, an institution’s calculation of risk and creditworthiness has two goals: to determine an applicant’s likelihood of repayment and the lender’s ability to enforce the loan contract.
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“To that end, the importance of considering immigration status when assessing the potential of repayment is nothing short of common sense,” the senators wrote.
Garland and Chopra wrote that the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) “does not expressly prohibit consideration of immigration status.”
“However, creditors should be aware that unnecessary or overbroad reliance on immigration status in the credit decisioning process, including when that reliance is based on bias, may run afoul of ECOA’s anti discrimination provisions and could also violate other laws,” Garland and Chopra said.
And, to think, Garland and his goofy logic almost had a lifetime seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Special thanks to Warhammer’s Wife for proofreading this story before publication. Follow Warhammer on Twitter @Real_Warhammer
