Asked what he thought of people comparing ICE to Nazis, acting director Thomas Homan replied with the Nuremberg defense.

In a June 2018 interview with Fox's Tucker Carlson, Thomas Homan, then the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that comparing ICE agents to Nazis is unfair, because “they’re simply enforcing laws enacted by Congress”.

The legalistic formulation employed by Homan is better known as the “Nuremberg defense” – a defense that was used by Nazi war criminals following the second world war in an attempt to escape accountability for their crimes against humanity.

According to Wiktionary, the Nuremberg defense is defined as:

"An explanation offered as an excuse for behaving in a criminal or wrongful manner, claiming that one acted in this way because one was ordered by others (particularly superiors) to do so."

The Nuremberg defense does not relieve criminal liability under international law since it can be used to excuse horrific human rights abuses.

In his interview with Carlson, Homan said that he wished that people were as outraged at crimes committed by undocumented immigrants as they are about Trump's 'zero tolerance policy'.

“Let’s protect American citizens as much as [they're] fighting (referring to those who are against the zero tolerance policy) for the illegal alien,” he told Carlson.

Watch above.