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Illegal immigrants caught up in court system
BY JENNIFER BROOKS / News Journal Washington Bureau
08/24/2005WASHINGTON -- Thousands of illegal immigrants, who once would have simply been escorted to the border, are winding up in federal courts and federal detention facilities, according to a study out today.

"We used to take them to the bridge and watch them walk across. Now, we're sending them to court," said Marjorie Meyers, a public defender in the nation's busiest federal immigration court -- the U.S. District Court in Houston, Texas. "There was a dramatic increase in our workload."

In Meyers' south Texas federal judicial district, Department of Homeland Security recommendations for immigration prosecutions shot up from 4,062 cases in 2003 to 18,092 in 2004.

Attorneys would come to work on a Monday and find 100 defendants waiting to be interviewed and processed, Meyers said.

Nationwide, the Department of Homeland Security recommended 65 percent more cases for prosecution in 2004 than in the previous year, according to data obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a Syracuse University-affiliated group that tracks various types of federal enforcement and regulation.

Convictions were up 70 percent, to more than 31,000, in 2004.

If south Texas were factored out, the nationwide increase in prosecution referrals last year would be closer to 8 percent, according to clearinghouse co-director David Burnham, who analyzed the data.

"It's a modest increase [nationwide] in comparison to Texas South. But it's still a lot of people who are getting caught in the system," Burnham said.

Several of the 90 federal judicial districts stand out when last year's referral rates are compared to rates in 2001, the year of the 9/11 attacks.

In Delaware, referrals for prosecution increased by 70 percent, from 10 in 2001 to 17 last year.

In New Jersey, referrals increased from 69 to 240 since 2001; in Michigan, they increased from 55 to 192; and in Florida's middle district, they increased from 266 to 565.

Most of the new prosecutions are for misdemeanors, such as border violations.

"These are prosecutions not for smuggling, not for drug offenses, not for violent crimes," said Lucas Guttentag, director of the National Immigration Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, who said the prosecution trend began in the 1990s. "You're seeing a massive diversion of criminal justice resources from enforcement and prosecution of serious crimes to what are apparently minor offenses."

A spike in Texas

The Department of Homeland Security declined to comment directly on the study, but Jamie Zuieback, spokeswoman for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement service, said the department works closely with federal prosecutors to determine which cases merit punishment in court.

"We look at every individual case and determine what's appropriate in each case," she said.

Neither the researchers, nor the Department of Homeland Security, nor activists who work with the immigrant community could explain the surge in prosecutions, or why enforcement varies so widely between judicial districts.

While prosecutions spiked in Texas, other border states -- Arizona, New Mexico and California -- saw only moderate increases.

In Houston, U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg said a change in the south Texas district court reporting system accounted for part of the spike in reported prosecutions. But he said the court is bringing an increasing number of immigration cases to court.

"Obviously, we do more immigration and narcotics cases than anything else," Rosenberg said. "But that doesn't mean we aren't also handling [cases of] public corruption, fraud, crimes against children. ... It may look like they're a smaller part of the pie, but that's because the pie is so darn big."

According to the study, immigration prosecutions now make up a third of the caseload in federal courts, outstripping prosecutions for drug and weapons violations, white-collar crime or terrorism.

'Hot political issue'

Doris Meissner, who headed the Immigration and Naturalization Service during the Clinton administration, said the study showed that no one has a hard and fast solution to the issue of illegal immigration.

"I think it's gotten to be an incredibly hot political issue," said Meissner, now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. The problem with the current approach to immigration enforcement, she said, is that it focuses almost exclusively on catching people at the borders, rather than cracking down on those who offer them jobs once they arrive in the United States.

Another point the study raised, she said, is that immigration enforcement "has almost nothing to do with anti-terrorism efforts. Often when the government, and Homeland Security in particular, talks about antiterrorism efforts, they're including immigration efforts," she said. "When the two aren't the same at all."