Immigration Law

Immigration Prosecutions Surge Under Bush Administration

By Robert Kraft

As reported in the Dallas Morning News, immigration prosecutions in the federal courts more than quadrupled during the eight years of the Bush administration and Texas' two border districts led the nation in the surge, according to a new report by a Syracuse University research center. The problem with this focus on illegal immigration is that it has taken valuable resources away from prosecution of white-collar crimes and drug violation. Here are excerpts from the article:

Even the Dallas-based Northern Judicial District of Texas was part of the increase, though the number of prosecutions – 357 in the 2008 fiscal year – was a fraction of the 25,061 prosecutions in the Southern district of Texas.

The report by the Syracuse group known as the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, also showed a decline in certain types of prosecutions such as white-collar crime and narcotics filings. 

The TRAC report also reflected the results from a zero-tolerance approach to illegal border-crossers known as Operation Streamline. For example, in the Southern district of Texas, prosecutors acted upon 98 percent of referrals in the last fiscal year.

In North Texas, however, former U.S. Attorney Richard Roper, who stepped down last month to join a private practice, said he didn't prosecute every immigration case referred to his office. TRAC reports show the Dallas office prosecuted about 63 percent of the referrals.

Roper said he scrutinized cases for those involving illegal re-entry of individuals who already had a significant criminal record, or drug trafficking or firearms convictions.

"There is no question that after 9/11 there was a significant change in priorities on cases," said Roper, now a partner with Thompson & Knight. "And there was an increased emphasis placed on immigration because of the connection to terrorism activity and in response to Congress' concern that we weren't protecting the border."

"The practical effect is it hurt our ability to prosecute white-collar fraud," Roper said. "If we don't do them in the U.S. attorney's office they won't get done because they are so labor-intensive. It is difficult for the local district attorney's office to handle that."

But according to the TRAC report, white-collar prosecutions are down almost 15 percent nationally from the level in the last year of President Clinton's administration. There were 8,108 prosecutions in fiscal year 2008, compared with 9,532 prosecutions in fiscal year 2000.

 Individual narcotic filings also slumped, TRAC said. For the entire eight years, prosecutions of drug violators were down by almost 20 percent. There were 26,336 prosecutions in fiscal year 2008, compared with 32,753 in fiscal year 2001.

Last fiscal year, there were nearly 80,000 prosecutions of immigration cases, double the previous year and up from 17,000 in fiscal year 2002. The top four venues for immigration cases were the Southern district of Texas, the Western district of Texas with about 19,000 cases, Arizona with nearly 16,000 cases and New Mexico with about 5,600 cases.

"It is a really quite drastic change in policy, and it clearly has an enormous effect on federal enforcement, especially in Texas and the other border districts," said David Burnham, co-director of TRAC. "Other kinds of prosecutions appear to be getting less attention."

Some were critical of the shift to a policy that spawned a fused area of law that some called crimmigration. For years, many offenses had been handled under civil statutes in administrative courts, though laws existed to prosecute some cases using criminal statutes.

Legal triage means resources aren't deployed against more serious crimes, and that eats into the time of federal public defenders and magistrates, said Austin-based immigration attorney Dan Kowalski.

"I don't mind my tax dollars being spent on a direct crime," Kowalski said. "Criminally prosecuting drywallers on re-entry cases rather than high-level arms dealers would be a joke if it were not a travesty."

Full post as published by Immigration Law Answers Blog on January 13, 2009 (boomark / email).