Thread: Illegal Immigrant Cases Clogging Federal Courts

Illegal Immigrant Cases Clogging Federal Courts
Jeff Golimowski

(CNSNews.com) - If you drive by the federal courthouse in Las Cruces, N.M., on a Sunday night, you'll probably see something odd: the lights are burning. Workers in the Court Clerk's Office for the District of New Mexico are working late on Sundays, getting ready for Monday mornings.

"[My staff] is stretched pretty thin," admitted Clerk of the Court Matt Dykman. "You'll have 50 or 60 new complaints coming in, and that starts at 8:30 [on a Monday], so there's no way to get ready unless you come in at 5 A.M." Instead, "they come in at seven on Sunday."

New Mexico is one of five U.S. District Courts -- the others are Arizona, Southern California, Western Texas, and Southern Texas -- on the front line of the illegal immigration debate.

An investigation into those courts reveals a system stretched to the breaking point. Cybercast News Service looked at each of the more than 90 U.S. District and Territorial Courts' criminal case filings since 2002. The five border districts saw an average of 3,730 criminal cases a year, compared to just 425 criminal cases in the other federal courts (see spreadsheet).

The difference, say law enforcement and prosecutors on the border, is illegal immigration.

More than half the criminal cases in each of the five border districts deal with federal immigration charges (an average of 2,264 cases a year). In New Mexico, 71 percent of all criminal cases in 2006 were immigration-related, while 70 percent of all cases in Southern Texas that year were linked to immigration.

In non-border districts, by contrast, the average is 54 immigration cases a year, or slightly over ten percent.

The problem has exploded in recent years, causing massive backlogs and slowing other court business to a crawl.

"From 1994 to 2004 our district quadrupled in filings," said Dykman. "The volume of people just makes it a nightmare."

Border district officials trace the spike in cases to stepped-up enforcement efforts along the U.S.-Mexico border. While Congress and the Bush administration have added funding for thousands of new Border Patrol agents since 2001, there hasn't been a similar funding increase for those who process the suspects.

"There is a huge misconception among the public that a criminal immigration case doesn't require a lot of effort or a lot of work," said New Mexico U.S. Marshal George Eden. "Each and every one of those defendants in these cases is entitled to the same process as anyone in the federal court system."

That means a public defender, if the defendant can't afford a lawyer; an arraignment; and a speedy trial. Plus, federal probation officers run criminal background checks on every undocumented immigrant in the system in an effort to find those with warrants or other legal problems in other states.

"We find out who people really are, how dangerous they really are," said New Mexico Chief Probation Officer Anita Chavez. "That's some really in-depth searching all over the country."

Yet, as one U.S. Marshal in Arizona put it, funding for public defenders and court services officers isn't "sexy," or easy to sell to other lawmakers. Without those critical pieces of the legal system, law enforcement officials say the efficiency of the entire process is devastated.

Senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) is trying to fix it.

"I've been working very hard to get more judges and more federal marshals and more of the clerks and the other specialty items that are used in trying to take care of these huge [case]loads," said Domenici. "We haven't looked at judgeships on a regular basis as these problems of border criminality have grown."

Domenici has proposed several bills aimed at rectifying the situation, including one aiming to increase the number of federal judgeships in districts with heavy criminal immigration caseloads, and another seeking to increase the number of deputy U.S. Marshals investigating immigration crimes.

He also included similar proposals in the controversial Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007.

He said those measures to solve the backlog were, in essence, emergency repairs which shouldn't be lumped in with the bigger issue of immigration reform. However, he added that reform was also necessary to prevent future problems.

"We've got to have some real commitment when we get [immigration reform] done -- the public knows what happened, we do them and then we don't enforce them and they don't work," said Domenici. "That's why they're laughing at us. We've got to say, 'Okay, laugh now, but we're going to get it done.'"

In the meantime, Court Clerk Dykman says his staff will just keep soldiering on, despite conditions which sometimes make him shake his head.

"In our district we have to have group guilty pleas," he said. "It's more like a traffic court environment than a federal court environment."

In fact, those five border districts now make up more than 30 percent of all federal criminal cases every year.

(CNSNews.com Correspondent Katherine Poythress contributed to this report.)

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http://www.crosswalk.com/news/11544347/

why do we even have to have court for illegals? if they are illegal deport them without delay. there is no reason for court. if they cant show a passport or greencard just deport them

This facet of the illegal immigrant debate has been given far too little attention. If this bill passes our already-crowded court dockets will spiral out of control. It can take years to process a case through the federal system and usually all actions below are stayed during the pendency of the case. This will leave the illegals in place until all appeals are exhausted.

Maybe the law that needs to be changed is giving them the same rights as citizens of this country, it just doesn't make sense, you come here illegally and you have all the same rights as we do and then some!

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Maybe the law that needs to be changed is giving them the same rights as citizens of this country, it just doesn't make sense, you come here illegally and you have all the same rights as we do and then some!

That would entail abolishing the ACLU which is not a bad idea. They did a lot of good things during the segration era, etc., but they have long since outlived their usefulness. I agree that an illegal immigrant who is able to steal his way into the country should not immediately be vested with all the rights of citizenship.