Thread: Prosecutions of illegal entry a driving force in mass incarceration in US – report

If the family wants to be with the father and he cannot be in this country, them the family should join him in his instead staying here on the welfare system. Applying to Lynch to decriminalize illegal reentry is NOT the answer. I don't care how many there are - deport them.JMO

Prosecutions of illegal entry a driving force in mass incarceration in US – report

Mexican nationals account for 15% of federal prison population as illegal entry prosecutions make up half of all criminal cases in US federal court system in 2015



Cases against immigrants for having illegally entered the country at the US-Mexico border accounted for half of all criminal cases in the US federal court system last year. Photograph: Sandy Huffaker/AFP/Getty ImagesRenée Feltz

Renee Feltz
Thursday 14 July

The Obama administration’s prosecution of immigrants who cross the border into the US is a driving force in mass incarceration, according to a new report.

Cases against immigrants for having illegally entered the country, known as illegal entry and re-entry, accounted for half of all criminal cases in the US federal court system last year, a report from Justice Strategies and Grassroots Leadership found. Non-citizens currently make up nearly a quarter of the total federal prison population, with Mexican nationals alone accounting for 15%.

Now several US judges who sentenced thousands of immigrants say the zero-tolerance policy for such cases they helped enforce was ineffective and should end.

“The only thing we have done is destroyed the lives of many people whose only crime is a desire to exercise their human rights to feed and care for themselves and their families,” said retired judge Felix Recio, who served as a federal magistrate from 1999 to 2013 in Brownsville, Texas, across the border from Matamoros, Mexico.

Recio is one of five retired federal judges, along with former prosecutors and public defenders from border districts in Texas and Arizona, who are featured in the report that critically examines a decade-old immigration enforcement initiative called “Operation Streamline”.

Federal law says migrants who improperly enter the country on what amounts to a misdemeanor trespass offense can face six months in prison. Those charged with felony re-entry face a maximum of two years, or more with prior offenses.

These laws were rarely enforced until a 2005 directive under George W Bush that was expanded by the Obama administration. As a result, the civil process of detaining and deporting tens of thousands of immigrants each year now begins only after they have finished a prison sentence.

Since 2005, nearly 750,000 people have been prosecuted in federal courts for improper migration. Their criminal records will likely make them ineligible for any legal path to citizenship.

The number of improper-entry prosecutions peaked at 54,175 in 2009 and 53,822 in 2013, after Obama’s election and re-election campaigns. The latest data available is from 2015 and shows prosecutions have fallen to 35,770.

“Prosecutions are tied to political directives, not migration patterns,” said Judith Greene of Justice Strategies, who co-authored the report with Grassroots Leadership. “So we might very well expect another spike in 2016.”

Most were picked up by US border patrol officers, and soon brought to court where they were tried in leg chains by the dozen. They received a hearing that strains due process by collapsing into a single event their arraignment, guilty plea and sentencing. In their pleas deals, they are usually required to waive their right to appeal. Still, the migrants keep returning.

“I don’t give many lectures to them about why they should not be coming back,” said retired federal judge Charles Pyle, of those who appeared before his court along the border in Tucson, Arizona. “Because I just don’t think that what I have to say has much impact compared to: ‘But my wife and my children are up in Kansas’ or ‘I was about to be killed back in Michoacán.’”

Almost as if to underscore the initiative’s failure, felony re-entry cases now outnumber those for first time crossers in many federal court districts along the US-Mexico border.

“We have an idea in this country that giving progressively higher sentences is a deterrent. It is not,” said Donna Coltharp, a federal public defender in Texas. “We need a different paradigm for the ‘revolving door’ people” who have US citizen families they want to reconnect with and support.

The report’s authors plan to ask the US attorney general, Loretta Lynch, to de-prioritize and ultimately end improper entry and re-entry prosecutions.

“The way to deal with this is to decriminalize it,” Recio said. “I think we should abandon the policy we have.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...prisons-report

“The only thing we have done is destroyed the lives of many people whose only crime is a desire to exercise their human rights to feed and care for themselves and their families,” said retired judge Felix Recio, who served as a federal magistrate from 1999 to 2013 in Brownsville, Texas, across the border from Matamoros, Mexico.
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Go exercise their human right to care for themselves on THEIR soil. Dumping them on US Taxpayers is NOT the solution! Go address the problems on their soil and put in a Comprehensive Plan for Reform. Including mandatory population control.

NO MORE!

AMERICAN'S FIRST