Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier on Thursday blamed the Biden administration for a scheme where tax collector employees sold driver’s licenses to immigrants who didn’t take the required test.
Uthemeier linked the fraud in Panama City to former President Joe Biden’s immigration policies during a press conference announcing the arrests of the two public employees, five people who helped the employees commit the fraud, and one woman who had paid to receive a passing grade on her driving skills test.
“I think today is yet another example of how the Biden border policy puts American families at risk. Here you’ve got hundreds of aliens that are cheating, that are breaking the law, that are buying driver’s licenses without taking the test, getting on the roads, putting everybody in danger,” Uthmeier said.
Immigration officials also appeared at the press conference with Uthmeier to further the message of cracking down on illegal immigration.
Bay County Sheriff Tommy Ford said most of the people who got fraudulent licenses had an immigration status authorizing them to drive illegally, based on the information gathered during the month-long investigation.
Police seized on Wednesday $120,000 that the employees appeared to have made from the scheme that has been going on for three years, Ford said.
“What we have found so far in this case is that most of the aliens that were getting driver’s licenses have some type of status. Some of that is the asylum status, which we know is a very controversial process, and doesn’t take a lot to get that status,” Ford said without presenting evidence that that was the case for the asylum seekers who bought the licenses.
At this time, Ford said officials didn’t know when the immigrants buying licenses had entered the country.
Ford didn’t have a narrow estimate of how many licenses the employees had sold, saying that hundreds or thousands of people living across the state could have bought a license from the Panama City tax collector’s office.
Asylum seekers with valid work permits can get driver’s licenses in Florida.
Chuck Purdue, Bay County’s tax collector, said his office first noticed indications of the fraud in April, when he saw one of the employees had conducted 295 road exams in one month — the average is 20 to 25. But he sidestepped a question about whether the supervisors of the arrested employees would face consequences, and said that the two employees were the only ones known to have sold the licenses.
“The sheriff and I’ll have to talk about that. We have not talked about it that far yet,” Purdue said.
Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com.
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