Thread: Detainees Sentenced in Seconds in ‘Streamline’ Justice on Border

Detainees Sentenced in Seconds in ‘Streamline’ Justice on Border

By FERNANDA SANTOSFEB. 11, 2014


Border Patrol agents stopped immigrants who tried to cross the border near Mission, Tex., last year. A new effort seeks to reduce repeat offenses. John Moore/Getty Images

TUCSON — “My record is 30 minutes,” Magistrate Judge Bernardo P. Velasco of Federal District Court here said one afternoon, describing the speed with which he had sealed the fates of 70 migrants caught sneaking into the country. Each of the accused had 25 seconds, give or take, to hear the charges against him, enter a plea and receive a sentence.

This is a part of the battle against illegal immigration that many Americans have never heard of. Known as Operation Streamline, it is the core of a federal program that operates in three border states, using prosecution and imprisonment as a front-line deterrent to people who try to cross the border illegally. It is part of a broader strategy of increasing the consequences for people who break immigration laws.

Unlike the civil immigration courts spread throughout the country, where deportation cases are handled as violations of the nation’s administrative code, the courts used for Operation Streamline treat unauthorized immigrants as criminals and the act of illegally crossing the border as a federal crime.

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Magistrate Judge Bernardo P. Velasco hears and tries Operation Streamline cases in Tucson.

Samantha Sais for The New York Times

Men and women arrested along the border, the chains around their ankles and wrists jingling as they move, are gathered to answer to the same charges — illegal entry, a misdemeanor, and illegal re-entry, a felony. They have not had an opportunity to bathe since they set off to cross the desert; the courtroom has the smell of sweaty clothes left for days in a plastic bag. Side by side in groups of seven as they face the bench, they consistently plead guilty to a lesser charge, which spares them longer time behind bars. The immigration charge is often their only offense.

“As ugly as some people think it is, it’s a bargain for the defendants,” Judge Velasco said in an interview in his chambers. “What we do is constitutional, it satisfies due process. It may not look good, but it does everything the law requires.”

Nonetheless, the mass deportations have led to accusations of assembly-line justice. The program began under President George W. Bush, but it has grown under President Obama, underscoring the aggressive way with which his administration has pursued deportations, which reached 1.9 million in December, a record for an American president.

In Tucson, the proceedings start promptly at 1:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, except for federal holidays, and end whenever the presiding judge — there is a different one each week — gets through all the defendants, a maximum of 70 here because that is as many as the court’s cells can hold. (If Judge Velasco is the fastest, Magistrate Judge Charles R. Pyle is known for taking the longest — two hours and 35 minutes for 70 defendants last week.)

“The whole thing is basically about meeting the minimum requirements so as not to violate your rights,” Saúl M. Huerta, a lawyer hired by the government at $110 an hour to represent the migrants, said in an interview.

Sentences range from 30 days to six months and are served in federal prisons, county jails and private detention centers that operate under contract with the government. Keeping the migrants from their families and the possibility of jobs to sustain them is one part penalty, one part incentive for them not to try to come back. (An illegal re-entry conviction carries a maximum of two years in prison, but it can be up to 20 years if the migrant has been deported before and has an aggravated-felony conviction.)


Efrain Alejandro, 32, who says he has just served his second sentence in two years under Operation Streamline, at a soup kitchen in Nogales, Mexico. Samantha Sais for The New York Times

With the House speaker, John A. Boehner, predicting that there will be no immigration overhaul legislation this year, Operation Streamline seems likely to keep a central role in the federal government’s border-enforcement strategy. A comprehensive bill approved by the Senate last June called for tripling the size of the program in the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector, where it started in 2008, to 210 migrants a day from 70, even if its effectiveness has been difficult to prove.

While in its early years the program here included migrants caught crossing the border for the first time, almost everyone prosecuted under it these days is a repeat offender. For the migrants, reassurance comes in the form of a pat in the back or a squeeze on the shoulder from their lawyers, who then pump hand sanitizer from one of the dozen bottles visible in court.

Last week, at a soup kitchen in Nogales, Mexico, where deported migrants gather for breakfast, Efrain Alejandro, 32, who had just served his second sentence in two years under Operation Streamline, was already plotting his return.

“I have no family left in Mexico,” said Mr. Alejandro, describing his surrender to Border Patrol agents after three days lost in the desert, abandoned by the smuggler who had been guiding his group. “There’s no other option for me.”

An analysis released in May by the Congressional Research Service found that the recidivism rate among migrants deported under Operation Streamline in the 2012 fiscal year was 10 percent, compared with a rate of 27 percent for migrants who agreed to a voluntary return, thus avoiding prosecution. In the previous year, recidivism rates of both deportation programs were 12 percent and 29 percent, according to the analysis, which was based on fingerprints gathered from migrants apprehended at the border.

“This is the hardest evidence we have suggesting that Streamline has had more of a deterrent effect than putting people on a bus and sending them back to Mexico,” said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who has studied the effects of border enforcement on migration.



Sentences can range from 30 days to six months and are served in prisons, jails or detention centers. John Moore/Getty Images

But Mr. Alden cautioned: “How strong? It’s impossible at this point to tell.” The issue, he said, is the limited amount of statistics the federal government has made available.

About 209,000 people were processed under Operation Streamline from 2005, when the program began in Del Rio, Tex., to the end of the 2012 fiscal year, constituting about 45 percent of the 463,000 immigration-related prosecutions carried out in the Border Patrol’s Southwestern districts, the analysis found.

During this time, apprehensions along the border fell by 61 percent, and the proportion of migrants deported through some type of court program, like Streamline, increased to 86 percent, from 23 percent in 2005.

Stepping up prosecutions is “a fairly standard law enforcement response if there’s a concern about lawbreaking and the current measures aren’t working,” said David A. Martin, a professor of law at the University of Virginia and a former general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security who was part of the Obama administration’s push to change deportation priorities.

As a result, “illegal re-entry” ranked as the top immigration charge in federal district courts over the last five years, according to statistics compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research organization at Syracuse University.

In Tucson, 73,900 people were prosecuted under Operation Streamline from Jan. 1, 2008 to Dec. 31, statistics from the Mexican Consulate here show. For its part, the Border Patrol, which releases statistics by fiscal year, apprehended about 818,000 migrants in the Tucson Sector from Oct. 1, 2008 to Sept. 30, 2013.

Ricardo Pineda Albarrán, the Mexican consul here, dispatches a person to court each day to track the fate of the defendants, mostly Mexican men, and a rotating cast of up to 10 other workers to keep their families informed, wherever they are.

“We respect the process; the United States is a sovereign country,” Mr. Albarrán said in Spanish. “But compressing a decision about someone’s future in a minutes, seconds, when the circumstances of each case are so different, has a devastating social and human impact.” And that happens, he said, “on both sides of the border.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/12/us...w&rref=us&_r=0

At last it seems that the English and the Swiss are fighting to preserve their national sovereignty and cultural heritage. A sick alliance of the mega rich and mega government appears to be the driving force attempting the destruction of Western culture and national identity.

They are using a theoretical prosperity from a European Union (a United States of Europe) to justify that cultural destruction. The EU, is a sick hybrid of socialists/progressives/Marxist and internationalist mega rich. It psychotically equates any expression of national sovereignty, cultural pride or identity with racism or xenophobia.

Since when have the mega rich elitists and the arrogant, power obsessed Marxist been anointed as the one, only, final and infallible authorities on racial issues and xenophobia?

Google or Bing “rebellion UK immigration” or “Swiss vote to limit on immigration from EU.” Also look up “Muslim rape epidemic in Sweden.”

You will be amazed by the similarities between what is happening in Europe because of a mass alien migration and what is happening with the illegal aliens invasion in the USA. And it is the same groups of people who are the driving force behind all of it.

Federal Program Delivers Speedy 25-Second Trials to Illegal Immigrants, Then Jail

allgov.com
“We respect the process; the United States is a sovereign country,” ... has discouraged people from coming back over the border without authorization . . .