Sheriff claims during White House briefing that undocumented migrant “drunks” are going to “run over your children”

The White House held a press briefing earlier today with Matt Albence, director of the cryptofasict, xenophobic, sexually predatory organization know as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). During the event, a Texas sheriff was allowed to approach the microphone and rant and things quickly went off the rails.

Sheriff Bill E. Waybourn of Tarrant county started off by defending ICE, which has come under much-needed increased scrutiny and criticism over the past years. He absurdly claimed that the mistreatment of ICE officers is akin to the mistreatment that Vietnam War veterans faced when coming home from Southeast Asia as if any comparison can really be made between men and woman locking children in cages and sexually abusing them and PTSD-suffering soldiers, many of them draftees, being spit on and jeered at after returning from overseas. The sense of victimhood these jackbooted thugs somehow manage to feel for themselves as they beat and abuse immigrants is truly staggering.

Waybourn then rattled off a bunch of statistics about violent undocumented immigrants in custody in his county, implicitly misrepresenting the liberal criticisms of current policy. Nobody is arguing that undocumented immigrants don’t ever commit crimes. They’re people and some fraction of people, citizens or otherwise, will always commit crimes. The problem is that the Trump administration has created an atmosphere in which all undocumented immigrants, even the law-abiding innocent ones, are smeared with the same brush. We need a more just, more humane approach to the issue of immigration and ICE and Trump are a direct impediment to that.

Add your name to tell Congress to investigate Pence for his role in Trump’s Ukraine corruption. The VP is complicit!

The sheriff then dove into some Grade A fearmongering by implying that releasing some of the migrants under arrest for DUI (admittedly a bad idea) would unleash a wave of vehicular pedicide across the United States.

“If we have to turn them loose or they get released, they’re coming back to your neighborhood and my neighborhood. These drunks will run over your children and they will run over my children,” Waybourn said without a trace of irony.

While no one would argue that DUI offenders should be free to terrorize the roads, Waybourn is taking a small fraction of offenders and ballooning it into a massive threat. These right-wingers can’t rely on actual facts and numbers because their agenda is ultimately indefensible and couched in nothing but fear and barely veiled racism. Instead, they go for emotional appeals that they hope will convince Americans to back their destructive policies.

Watch below.

Natalie Dickinson

Natalie is a staff writer for the Washington Press. She graduated from Oberlin College in 2010 and has been freelance blogging and writing for progressive outlets ever since.