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Illegal Immigration Fuels Federal Prosecutions Spike Updated: 2 hours 52 minutes ago

Allan Lengel
Contributor
WASHINGTON (Dec. 2 – Federal prosecutions hit a record high in fiscal 2009, thanks to a sharp uptick in cases against immigrants trying to enter the United States illegally, according to a new report authored by a research center at Syracuse University.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which analyzed Justice Department data, also found that the FBI, the leader for many years, now ranks fourth among federal agencies, accounting for only 8.7 percent of the filings in 2009.

Customs and Border Protection was No. 1 with 46.5 percent of the cases, followed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement with 12 percent and the Drug Enforcement Administration with 9.5 percent, the report showed.

Susan B. Long, co-director of TRAC and a professor of managerial statistics at Syracuse University, said the increase in immigration cases was because of stepped-up immigration enforcement by the Bush administration, which continued under President Obama. Nine months of fiscal 2009 came under the Obama regime.

The TRAC report showed 169,612 filings against defendants in fiscal 2009, which ended Sept. 30, up 9 percent from the previous record of 155,694 in fiscal 2008 and 42 percent from five years ago (119,494).

The report showed immigration prosecutions jumped by 15.7 percent from 2008 to 2009, and accounted for 54 percent of the total federal prosecutor filings in fiscal 2009. Of those cases, 92 percent involved illegal entry or re-entry of an immigrant into the U.S. Three percent involved fraudulent visas, permits or other forms of identification.

Michael A. Olivas, an immigration expert at the University of Houston Law Center, told The New York Times that he expected immigration cases to rank high on the TRAC list. "I would have been astounded if it wasn't one or two," he said. "We're simply pushing the cattle through the chutes."

Long said It takes far less time to dispose of immigration cases, compared with white-collar and drug cases. She said some of the immigration cases can be disposed of in a day.

Drug cases accounted for the second highest number of criminal filings in 2009 with 16 percent, far below the 37 percent share of cases in 1997 during the intensified war on drugs, TRAC said.

Interestingly, the number of nonimmigration cases dropped in the past five years, going from 81,608 in 2004 to 77,713 in 2008, the report found.

The drop is even more significant, TRAC concluded, when considering that "the size of the population grew over the past five years."

The TRAC report noted that the Obama administration has tried to show concern in the areas of securities and mortgage fraud and other financial crimes.

"The prosecutions of these kinds of white-collar crimes, however, never appeared to have been a major concern of the Justice Department and the investigative agencies like the FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission," the report said.

"In (fiscal) 2009, for example, the Justice Department data showed there were only 178 securities fraud prosecutions. While up 22 percent from 2008, this figure still only represents about a third of what it was in 2002."
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