Thursday, December 12, 2024
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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.

โ€œThe CFPB and the Department of Justiceโ€™s (DOJโ€™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 regulatorsโ€”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,โ€ the senators wrote.

โ€œWe are also concerned that the CFPB and DOJโ€™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.โ€

At its most fundamental level, an institutionโ€™s calculation of risk and creditworthiness has two goals: to determine an applicantโ€™s likelihood of repayment and the lenderโ€™s ability to enforce the loan contract. 

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โ€œTo that end, the importance of considering immigration status when assessing the potential of repayment is nothing short of common sense,โ€ the senators wrote.

Garland and Chopra wrote that the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) โ€œdoes not expressly prohibit consideration of immigration status.โ€

โ€œHowever, 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 ECOAโ€™s anti discrimination provisions and could also violate other laws,โ€ 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 Warhammerโ€™s Wife for proofreading this story before publicationFollow Warhammer on Twitter @Real_Warhammer