We're drinking my friend, to the end
Of a brief episode
Make it one for my baby
And one more for the road

And if the “road” you’re hitting happens to be, say, Broadway or the Cross Bronx Expressway—and you’re in America illegally—you now get a big break from New York City Mayor Bill “This One’s On Me” DeBlasio.

You see, New York, as you didn’t need to be told, is a “sanctuary city” that doesn’t co-operate with the feds in deporting “undocumented” immigrants. Typically local police, when they arrest a crime suspect and discover that he or she isn’t a legal resident, they alert federal authorities, who can start deportation proceedings. Or at least that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

Sanctuary cities, however, pride themselves on keeping the feds in the dark about criminal activity on the part of illegal immigrants. So we’ve had such phenomena as the 2015 shooting death of 32-year-old Kate Steinle in San Francisco, another self-declared sanctuary city, allegedly by a Mexican national with a string of felony convictions and five previous deportations but whom San Francisco police had simply released three months earlier after he was detained on a drug warrant.

Nonetheless, DeBlasio has decided to cast himself as the heroic opponent of President Trump’s promise to withhold federal grant money from cities and states unless they drop their sanctuary status. And as he made it clear to CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday, New York won’t be helping the feds deport suspects arrested on either grand larceny or drunk-driving charges. According to the Hill, Tapper expressed some surprise at this broad shield for thieves and tipplers:

"If you’re a drunk driver and you’re an undocumented immigrant, why should there be a place for you in this country?” Tapper asked.

"Jake, there are 170 offenses in that law that are listed as serious and violent crimes that lead to automatic cooperation between the city of New York and our federal partners,” DeBlasio replied. “So any serious and violent crime, we’re going to work with them.”

“Is grand larceny or drunk driving a very minor offense?” Tapper followed.

“Drunk driving that does not lead to any other negative outcome, I could define as that,” DeBlasio said.

DeBlasio then went on to say:

“Someone commits a minor offense… let’s say someone went through a stop sign, they could be deported for that and their family could be torn apart and you could have children left behind where the breadwinner in the family is sent back to a home country, that is not good for anyone.”

Went through a stop sign? Isn’t that, uh, highly dangerous? And how sorry are we supposed to feel for a father who doesn’t care enough about his children to quit hitting the sauce before he hits the road?

            The exemption for grand larceny is pretty fascinating, too. Steal a car, get plastered, run a stop sign…and nothing will happen to you in the deportation department if you’re an illegal immigrant in New York.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving isn’t very happy about DeBlasio’s new policy. Why is this not a surprise?