Results 1 to 3 of 3

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

  1. #1
    Administrator Jean's Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2006
    Location
    California
    Posts
    65,443

    Some illegal immigrants commit other crimes, but 'data terri

    Some illegal immigrants commit other crimes, but 'data terrible'
    By Josh Brodesky and Kim Smith
    arizona daily star
    Tucson, Arizona | Published: 09.21.2008

    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.
    Many of those coming here illegally do end up in court — some for being here without permission, others for property, financial, drug or violent crimes.
    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 lack of hard numbers makes it nearly impossible to know whether our immigration policies are working — even as taxpayers spend tens of millions of dollars a year to house and defend illegal immigrants arrested in the Tucson area.
    "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."
    Camarota said everybody talks about the combination of illegal immigration and crime, but "nobody ever does anything about it."
    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. Those costs are not tracked.
    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."
    Soft statistics
    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.
    Still, Kimmins estimated that 90 percent of all the criminal cases prosecuted by her office had some kind of tie to the border, a connection that includes citizens and non-citizens. Most of those cases are either immigration- or drug-related.
    Just over half of Arizona's 4,700 federal felony sentencings in 2007 were for immigration violations, said a U.S. Sentencing Commission report. Nationally, immigration made up about a quarter of all felony sentencings.
    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.
    "That represents about half of all the marijuana seized along the Southwest border," Roll said. "It represents about 44 percent of everybody arrested for being here illegally."
    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.
    "I know that a very high number of our defendants in drug and gun cases are deportable," Roll said, referring to the Tucson Sector. "I'm sure a very high percentage of our defendants are deportable."
    Other federal officials offered similar experience-based estimates but no hard figures.
    "A majority of our arrests are not U.S. citizens. For trafficking, at least more than 50 percent," said Anthony Coulson, Drug Enforcement Administration assistant special agent in charge of the Tucson District Office.
    "Drug trafficking doesn't know any nationality or whether you have papers or anything like that. That's immaterial to the whole game," Coulson said.
    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.
    No tracking in Pima County
    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 non-partisan Pew Hispanic Center. The Urban Institute, a non-partisan research group, estimated most of those illegal immigrants, about 350,000, lived in the Phoenix metropolitan area.
    Similarly, the Arizona Department of Corrections knows that 13 percent of its 39,000 inmates are Mexican citizens, but it doesn't know how many came here illegally, said its spokes-man, Nolberto Machiche.
    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."
    Prosecution discretion
    LaWall has made a decision not to prosecute suspected illegal immigrants for being in the country illegally, unlike Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas, who believes they are guilty of a crime, the same as the "coyotes" — people smugglers — who bring them into the country.
    If LaWall opted to prosecute people whose sole crime was entering the country illegally, "we would not be able to prosecute murderers, rapists, child molesters, armed robbers and drug dealers," LaWall said. "The feds do prosecute thousands and thousands of them every year, and has it had a deterring effect? No."
    The most recent federal effort to deter illegal immigration is known as Operation Streamline, a so-called "zero-tolerance" approach to illegal immigration. Its goal is to prosecute 100 illegal immigrants a day, although prosecutions so far have hovered at 40 to 70 on most days. On some days, there are no prosecutions.
    Part of the challenge has been a lack of prosecutors — a problem that is being addressed with the new hires, who are to start this fall.
    But there is also a lack of space. With nowhere to put Operation Streamline defendants, one courtroom had to be turned into an ad hoc detention center. Defendants meet with their attorneys in the morning for about 20 minutes, and then they're prosecuted in the afternoons.
    Heather Williams, first assistant federal public defender in Tucson, said her office can provide two trial attorneys daily, each representing roughly six illegal-entrant defendants. The rest are represented by contract attorneys who are paid $100 an hour.
    Williams estimated that taxpayers spend about $8,000 a day on attorney costs for Operation Streamline. That troubles her, because almost all the defendants have been arrested solely for illegal entry.
    "Their priority seems to have been with charging first-timers," she said. "That is, people who have no prior criminal arrests in the U.S. and no prior immigration history."
    Customs and Border Patrol officials credit Operation Streamline with drastically reducing recidivism rates in Southern Arizona, but Williams disagrees. Immigration arrests already were declining, she said, and factors such as the weak economy and the time period the Border Patrol was studying could distort statistics.
    In a recent statement she gave to the U.S. House of Representatives, Williams called Operation Streamline "one of the least successful but most costly and time-consuming ways of discouraging entries and re-entries."
    In the federal system, taxpayers spend roughly $100,000 a month on gas and time for attorneys to travel to and from Florence, where illegal immigrants are held.
    The U.S. Marshals Service spent $71 million in the last year housing defendants specifically from Tucson in Florence — most of whom were illegal immigrants.
    Meanwhile, Tucson's federal court, saddled with one of the highest caseloads in the country, has asked for more judges.
    "I believe it can be very difficult for the border courts to get the resources they need," District Judge Roll said, noting that there are only five border courts in four states. "There's another 46 states who don't have the problem we have."
    Williams said she's concerned that the increase in prosecutors will result in public defenders handling more Operation Streamline cases while more serious criminal cases are farmed out to contract attorneys, ramping up costs to taxpayers.
    To some degree, county officials are feeling the strain, too.
    Pima County residents pay about $8 million a year to house and defend suspected illegal immigrants accused of non-immigration-related charges, county officials estimate.
    There were 1,211 Pima County jail inmates released to Immigration and Customs Enforcement last fiscal year, said Assistant County Administrator Lindy Funkhouser.
    County and federal officials are working together to reduce the time defendants spend in the county jail before being released to federal officials, Funkhouser said. They also hope to reduce the number of cases that go to contract defense attorneys — now about a third of the cases involving suspected illegal immigrants. Contract attorneys are paid more than public defenders.
    No matter what they do, illegal immigrants will always be brought to the jail, because the Pima County Attorney's Office must have time to review their cases to decide what charges, if any, should be filed against them, Funkhouser said.
    The role of policy
    Although Superior Court does not handle immigration cases, illegal immigration is affecting things there, too.
    Judges are required to determine within five days of a suspect's initial appearance whether that person is in the country illegally. Under Proposition 100, approved by Arizona voters in 2006, illegal immigrants accused of committing certain felonies are ineligible for bond.
    While Pima County's Pretrial Services division has been asking certain suspects to disclose their immigration status for at least 10 to 15 years, a formal determination hadn't been made before, said Rick Peck, Pretrial Services director.
    There are five to 20 Proposition 100 hearings every week, all of which require police officers, attorneys and Pretrial Services employees to take time away from their other duties.
    The hearings are often postponed, something that studies have shown drives up the cost of the criminal justice system, County Attorney LaWall said.
    Meanwhile, the debate on immigrants and crime continues.
    "There is no evidence linking illegal immigrants with crime," said Passel, of the Pew Hispanic Center, citing a handful of recent studies that support his contention. "There is plenty of data out there, and people don't pay attention to it."
    But Camarota, of the Center for Immigration Studies, has a different view.
    "The bottom line is, some data suggest it's low, and some data suggest it's high," he said. "We simply don't know."

    http://www.azstarnet.com/dailystar/258617
    Support our FIGHT AGAINST illegal immigration & Amnesty by joining our E-mail Alerts at https://eepurl.com/cktGTn

  2. #2
    Senior Member fedupinwaukegan's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jun 2006
    Location
    Waukegan, IL
    Posts
    6,134
    Well our sheriff just released some statistics and they are staggering. Half of our county murders committed by illegal aliens this past year. Host of other crimes. Nearly on quarter of jail is illegal aliens. Imagine the court costs....


    Curran also said the program could save the county millions. Once Immigration and Customs has a detainer on an inmate, it pays $65 to $75 daily to house the inmate in the jail. Curran said the Aug. 6 jailhouse audit found 122 of the 637 inmates were undocumented. More than 100 of those inmates were put under detainers, so the county can now apply to Immigration and Customs for reimbursement for housing those inmates—up to about $4.05 million per year.

    Curran said 25 of those undocumented inmates had been charged with driving under the influence, and the suspects in half of Lake County’s 14 murders this past year are undocumented. He guessed the numbers in Chicago are far higher.

    http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/news ... VARtZrSB3Z
    Join our efforts to Secure America's Borders and End Illegal Immigration by Joining ALIPAC's E-Mail Alerts network (CLICK HERE)

  3. #3
    Senior Member mapwife's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Location
    Tucson, AZ
    Posts
    2,697
    Star special report: Behind the border rhetoric
    By the numbers
    1,211 — Pima County jail inmates released to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in fiscal year 2007.
    $8.1 million — What it cost the county to house and defend them.
    378,000 — Suspected illegal immigrants arrested by the U.S. Border Patrol in fiscal year 2007 in the Tucson Sector.
    4,721 — Federal felony sentencings in 2007 in Arizona.
    54 percent — The portion of those cases that were for immigration.
    540 — Felony sentencings per district judge in Tucson, six times the national average.
    $71 million — What the U.S. Marshals Service spent in a year to house defendants from Tucson.
    About the series
    This year, the Arizona Daily Star strives to provide context to the immigration debate by analyzing the common rhetoric surrounding illegal immigration.
    The first installment, published in March, answered the question "Why don't all immigrants come here legally?" Find it on StarNet at: www.azstarnet.com/special/legalimmigration
    Today's installment, the second in the occasional series, asks, "Are illegal immigrants jamming our justice system?"
    â—
    Illegal aliens remain exempt from American laws, while they DEMAND American rights...

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •