Immigration Prosecutions Hit New High

Border Patrol agents patrol the Rio Grande near Del Rio, Tex. Apprehensions in the sector are down 70 percent since Operation Streamline began. (By Sylvia Moreno -- The Washington Post)
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Overall, the number of criminal immigration cases filed by U.S. prosecutors nearly doubled between January and February. They accounted for the majority of new Justice Department prosecutions nationwide in February -- about 7,250 out of 13,500 -- outnumbering all white-collar, civil rights, environmental and other criminal cases combined.

The surge in prosecutions accompanies other get-tough immigration-enforcement efforts, such as last month's raid on a kosher meatpacking plant in Iowa, where federal authorities detained 389 workers; 297 were convicted of immigration-related felonies, mainly using false documents to obtain jobs.

The prosecution data was collected by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, an independent research organization at Syracuse University that analyzes monthly Justice Department prosecution statistics.

A Justice spokesman, Dean Boyd, challenged the specifics but not the conclusions of the group's findings, which are based on data compiled by the department's Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys. He said some of the increase in prosecutions may be due to improved reporting. The department declined last week to provide its own count of immigration prosecutions.

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said the program has had "great success" in areas with relatively low migrant traffic because the threat of imprisonment and criminal prosecution has sent a "major message" to most border-crossers, "who turn out to be people who are simply looking for work."

"It's worked beautifully. Crime has dropped 76 percent in Del Rio, with the lowest level of illegal crossings they have ever seen," said Rep. John Culberson, a Houston area Republican who has worked with two border-district Democrats to promote the program. "Law enforcement is simple if you just enforce the law rigorously."

But experts warn against exaggerating Operation Streamline's potential. The crackdown comes amid a softening U.S. economy, which tends to decrease illegal immigration. And migrants and smugglers have responded to past enforcement efforts by moving to more remote areas.

Mukasey said the program would be much more difficult to expand to high-traffic areas, such as the Tucson sector, where the Border Patrol made 378,000 apprehensions in 2007, nearly half its total. That number is more than three times the total apprehended in the Yuma, Laredo and Del Rio sectors combined.

In fact, Tucson is emerging as the battleground for Operation Streamline's "zero tolerance" concept, presenting a case study of the challenges in ramping up the nation's legal machinery to tackle the estimated 1 million-plus people a year who cross the border illegally or overstay their visas. Authorities there have launched a modified version of the program that they hope to expand in coming months.

John M. Roll, chief judge of the U.S. District Court of Arizona, said that since January, authorities from the Justice and Homeland Security departments and the federal courts have worked closely to increase Operation Streamline-related prosecutions. They began with 40 cases a day, are prosecuting 70 now and hope to reach 100 per day by September.

In four months this year, the court's magistrate judges imposed 3,700 sentences for Operation Streamline-related minor offenses, close to the 4,700 petty and misdemeanor cases they handled in all of 2007. The court also handled 2,800 felony cases, mostly immigration-related, in Tucson last year, for a total of about 7,500 cases, making it the nation's third-busiest.

Meeting the 100-case-a-day goal would nearly triple the court's workload, to more than 20,000 cases. But even that effort would address only about 5 percent of the apprehensions made in Tucson last year.