Lack of data for tracking illegal immigrant crimes
September 27th, 2008 @ 2:17pm
by Associated Press

You've heard it from pundits and read it online: Illegal immigrants are clogging our legal system. They may come with the dreams of work and a better life, but they bring increased crime and strife.

But it's anyone's guess how many illegal immigrants enter the justice system, and how much it costs taxpayers. Neither the state nor the federal courts formally keep track.

``The data (are) terrible, and lead to entirely different conclusions,'' said Steven Camarota, of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports tighter immigration controls. ``No one has made it a priority. No one has ever wanted to know.''

Federal policies targeting illegal immigration also skew the picture. Although the number of people arrested in the Tucson Sector for illegal immigration has actually declined in recent years, the push is on to prosecute more illegal-entry cases, most recently through ``Operation Streamline,'' which aims to prosecute 100 illegal immigrants a day.

The emphasis on illegal immigration has overwhelmed Tucson's federal prosecutors to the point that they have declined to take on a number of serious drug-offense cases in recent years. To keep up, the U.S. Attorney's Office recently hired 22 more prosecutors and has converted a courtroom into a makeshift holding area for illegal immigrants waiting to see judges.

Illegal immigration made up half the felony sentencings in federal court here last year, but no one can say - beyond estimates - how many other federal crimes are tied to illegal immigrants.

It's a similar scene at Pima County Superior Court. Officials there agree that cases involving illegal immigrants put an extra burden on judges and attorneys - but no one knows how big a burden.

Estimates of the share of Pima County criminal cases involving illegal immigrants range from 3.5 percent to 11 percent.

Financial estimates are only slightly more specific. At a minimum, taxpayers spend about $80 million per year on cases involving illegal immigration that are processed through Pima County and the federal court in Tucson. But that doesn't include the cost of lawyers to represent and prosecute illegal border crossers charged with more serious federal crimes.

And it doesn't sort out those non-citizens in the court system who are here legally.

Still, Pima County Attorney Barbara LaWall is confident that the effect is small.

``The illegals we see are only an itty-bitty, tiny fraction of the illegals who are in Pima County and Arizona,'' LaWall said.

``Their presence here has a huge impact, but they are not driving the crime rate,'' she said. ``Ninety-seven percent of the folks we prosecute are homegrown criminals.''

It's clear that illegal immigrants do affect our court system, but getting an accurate count of cases is nearly impossible.

At the federal level, cases that involve only illegal entry are easy to identify, but tracking more serious crimes by illegal entrants just isn't done.

``The U.S. Attorney's Office prosecutes the cases based on whether a federal offense was committed,'' said Lynnette Kimmins, chief assistant U.S. attorney who heads the Tucson office. ``We don't keep track of a person's citizenship unless a lack of citizenship is an element to the crime.''

To do that, Kimmins said, would require a change in the computing system used in all U.S. attorneys' offices, not just those in Arizona.

Just over half of Arizona's 4,700 federal felony sentencings in 2007 were for immigration violations, said a U.S. Sentencing Commission report.

Felony cases include those involving people with multiple illegal-entry convictions and people here illegally who commit another serious crime. Most people arrested only for being here illegally are deported without being charged, or they're charged with misdemeanors.

``We are just one of nine sectors along the Southwest border, but our sector last year accounted for 380,000 arrests for people being here illegally and nearly a million pounds of marijuana being brought across the international border,'' said Chief U.S. District Judge John M. Roll of Tucson.

Less clear is the role that illegal immigrants play in other types of criminal cases, such as those involving drugs, guns or fraud.

Nationally, non-citizens accounted for about 30 percent of all drug felony sentencings, 8 percent of firearms sentencings and 20 percent of fraud sentencings. That includes people here legally and illegally.

At the county level, there are conflicting statistics on illegal immigrants in the system.

LaWall, the county attorney, said 3.5 percent of people with open cases in her office have an Immigration and Customs Enforcement hold on them, meaning the federal agency is investigating their legal status while they are held in the county jail.

Presiding Superior Court Judge Jan Kearney, however, said 11 percent of suspects with pending criminal cases in Pima County Superior Court have acknowledged that they are in the country illegally.

It's unclear how that compares with Pima County's population of illegal immigrants, because no one is really tracking it. Most estimates are either statewide or for Phoenix.

Varying estimates from 2006, the most recent available, placed the state's population of illegal immigrants at about 450,000 to 500,000, said Jeffrey Passel of the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center. The Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research group, estimated most of those illegal immigrants, about 350,000, lived in the Phoenix metropolitan area.

Whatever the number, LaWall and Kearney said the immigration debate is more a product of a change in people than any change in the issue. ``The level of immigration, both legal and illegal, has been enormous for the last 20 years, but nothing has really changed,'' Kearney said. ``There is just more public attention and concern now. It's how the laws have changed that have had an impact. It's not the illegals who have had an impact.''


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