Immigration Prosecutions Hit New High

From The Washington Post:

Federal law enforcement agencies have increased criminal prosecutions of immigration violators to record levels, in part by filing minor charges against virtually every person caught illegally crossing some stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border, according to new U.S. data.

Officials say the threat of prison and a criminal record is a powerful deterrent, one that is helping drive down illegal immigration along the nearly 2,000-mile frontier between the United States and Mexico.

Before Operation Streamline, as the program is known, most Mexican nationals caught at the border were fingerprinted and returned to Mexico without criminal charges.

The program is now in place in parts of Texas and Arizona.

First piloted in December 2005 near Del Rio, Tex., Operation Streamline requires that virtually everyone caught illegally crossing segments of the border be charged with at least a misdemeanor immigration count and jailed until they are brought to court and, if convicted, eventually deported. A conviction jeopardizes any future legal entry to the United States.

Federal officials credit the program and other measures for contributing to a 20 percent drop in apprehensions of illegal immigrants on the U.S.-Mexico border in 2007, to 859,000. That figure is on track to drop an additional 15 percent this year.

In areas where it has been applied -- which total about 500 miles, or one-fourth of the border -- Operation Streamline has slowed border traffic more substantially.

The surge in prosecutions accompanies other get-tough immigration-enforcement efforts, such as last month's raid on a kosher meatpacking plant in Iowa, where federal authorities detained 389 workers; 297 were convicted of immigration-related felonies, mainly using false documents to obtain jobs. [This raid was the subject of a 5-13-08 post.]

[E]xperts warn against exaggerating Operation Streamline's potential. The crackdown comes amid a softening U.S. economy, which tends to decrease illegal immigration. And migrants and smugglers have responded to past enforcement efforts by moving to more remote areas.

Tucson [, where the Border Patrol made 378,000 apprehensions in 2007, nearly half its total,] is emerging as the battleground for Operation Streamline's "zero tolerance" concept, presenting a case study of the challenges in ramping up the nation's legal machinery to tackle the estimated 1 million-plus people a year who cross the border illegally or overstay their visas. Authorities there have launched a modified version of the program that they hope to expand in coming months.

John M. Roll, chief judge of the U.S. District Court of Arizona, said that since January, authorities from the Justice and Homeland Security departments and the federal courts have worked closely to increase Operation Streamline-related prosecutions. They began with 40 cases a day, are prosecuting 70 now and hope to reach 100 per day by September.

In four months this year, the court's magistrate judges imposed 3,700 sentences for Operation Streamline-related minor offenses, close to the 4,700 petty and misdemeanor cases they handled in all of 2007. The court also handled 2,800 felony cases, mostly immigration-related, in Tucson last year, for a total of about 7,500 cases, making it the nation's third-busiest.

Meeting the 100-case-a-day goal would nearly triple the court's workload, to more than 20,000 cases. But even that effort would address only about 5 percent of the apprehensions made in Tucson last year.