photo: Jason Cato

A full half of all people sentenced to federal prisons are now Latino while Latinos make up only 16% of the total population, according to a new report from the Associated Press (Garance Burke, Hispanics new majority sentenced to federal prison, September 6, 2011), reporting on Sentencing Commission data.

Is this because Latinos are now committing more crimes?  No, according to the report, it’s because of the shift towards prosecutions of immigration violations under programs like Operation Streamline:

Sentences for felony immigration crimes, which include illegal crossing as well as other crimes such as alien smuggling, accounted for most of the increase in the number of Hispanics sent to prison over the last decade.

Operation Streamline has ripped countless families apart, cost the government billions of dollars, enriched the private prison industry, caused a judicial emergency, and now is apparently contributing to monumental demographic shifts in the prison system.   Perhaps its time to rethink this program?

That’s the analysis behind an Associated Press (“More Hispanics go to federal prison,” June 4) article last month.  The reason appears to be precisely the subject of this blog: Operation Streamline is driving more Latino immigrants into the criminal justice system and ultimately into federal prisons:

“Expedited court hearings along the border are a major force driving a seismic demographic shift in who is being sent to federal prison. Statistics released this week revealed that Hispanics now comprise nearly half of all people sentenced for federal felony crimes, a number swollen by immigration offenses. In comparison, Hispanics last year made up 16 percent of the total U.S. population.

Sentences for felony immigration crimes, which include illegal crossing as well as other crimes such as alien smuggling, accounted for about 87 percent of the increase in the number of Hispanics sent to prison over the past decade, according to an analysis of U.S. Sentencing Commission data.”

… “The U.S. Sentencing Commission tracks the number of people who repeatedly enter the country illegally in a broad sentencing category called immigration crimes. The number of people sent to prison for the primary crime of unlawfully entering or remaining in the U.S. jumped from 6,513 in fiscal year 2000 to 19,910 in fiscal year 2010. Many people also were sentenced for that crime plus other, more serious offenses.”

In coming weeks, we’ll be posting more data on the expansion of the prison system due to Operation Streamline.  Stay tuned.

Last month, we had missed this blog article by Amy Frykholm in the Christian Century (“Assembly Line Justice,” June 30th)

Since it began in 2005, Operation Streamline has turned deportation cases previously handled exclusively by ICE into federal criminal cases that introduce thousands of people to our prisons every year. The ACLU has raised concerns about the program’s criminalization of impoverished people whose crime is crossing a border and seeking work. The group has called for the suspension of Operation Streamline until its costs, both financial and human, can be better calculated and understood. The chief federal judge of Arizona has asked that her caseload be called a “judicial emergency” so that she can bring in more resources. The 9th District Court agreed.

The program’s defenders say that it sends a strong message to people who cross the U.S. border illegally, and that it therefore is helpful to them–as well as to the border patrol agents who regularly arrest people in Arizona’s treacherous deserts. Other observers find both the spectacle of justice and the pain of individuals troubling. An organization called “Operation Streamline Watch” argues that if federal policy met its stated goal of “zero tolerance” for people who cross the border illegally, the caseload in the Tucson federal courthouse would go from the roughly 200 a day to more than 1,000.

If this happened, prisoners would need to be “processed” in groups of 40 instead of eight. We need to address the fundamental puzzle and colossal mess that is U.S. immigration policy. In the meantime, this ongoing assembly-line justice does little good.

We’ll keep you posted on continued opposition to Streamline amongst faith groups and of critical coverage in the religious press.

Each day at the Evo A. DeConcini U.S. Courthouse here, 70 undocumented migrants are seated in orderly rows, hushed like a quiet congregation in long pews in the low light of a modern courtroom.

On this day Judge Bernardo P. Velasco took little more than a half hour to call rank after rank of migrants to a line of microphones in front of the bench. The script was simple — questions delivered through an interpreter established that the defendants are citizens of other countries, mostly Mexico with a few from Guatemala, and that they knew they could have an individual trial, subpoena and cross-examine witnesses and refuse to testify.

NCR reporter Tom Roberts then gets the opinion of Judge Velacso, who sees Streamline cases like this day in and day out.

Not only does (Velasco) think the process borders on insanity, he makes the point that this endless path to legal futility is expensive — and expanding. He elaborated in a later phone interview:

“The point I make is we’re doing the same thing we did in 1976 when I was a federal public defender and we keep expecting a different result. That’s not realistic. It’s maddening. So we really need to find a way to allow foreign laborers to come in and out of this country with an understanding that if they can move back freely, they can pay taxes and they’ll return home. They won’t be forced to remain in the United States and/or forced to smuggle their families in.”

Velasco told the students he believes most migrants don’t want to live in the United States — they just want to work here.
Meanwhile, the government-funded industry that has evolved to try to keep immigration in check is flourishing. Velasco said when he was a public defender back in the mid-’70s, there were five public defenders, two lifetime-appointed judges, and one magistrate in Tucson.

Today there are five lifetime judges, seven magistrates, 40 public defenders and 60 assistant U.S. attorneys. The cost to prosecute defendants in Operation Streamline averages $10,000 a day and $50,000 a week, said Velasco.

And, that’s just the prosecution costs.  We found in Grassroots Leadership’s report Operation Streamline: Drowning Justice and Draining Dollars along the Rio Grande that Streamline-related detention costs in Texas alone have exceeded $1.2 billion since its inception in 2005.  An expansion of Streamline, called for by Arizona Senators McCain and Kyl amongst others, could cost more than $1 billion in annual court costs and add more than 50,000 new prison beds to the federal detention system.

For a well-articulated moral, economic, and policy critique of Operation Streamline, the National Catholic Reporter‘s full article is well worth a read.

photo: Jason Cato

Despite deep cuts in other parts of the budget, Senators John McCain and Jon Kyl of Arizona are proposing an expansion of Operation Streamline in their Senate bill 803.  Here’s the text of the bill:

SEC. 5. ENHANCING EXISTING BORDER SECURITY OPERATIONS.
(a) Operation Streamline-
(1) IMPLEMENTATION- The Attorney General, the Secretary, and the Director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts shall–
(A) fully implement Operation Streamline in the Southwest Border region; and
(B) reimburse State, local, and tribal law enforcement for any detention costs related to such implementation.
(2) ADDITIONAL MAGISTRATE JUDGES TO ASSIST WITH INCREASED CASELOAD ALONG SOUTHWEST BORDER- The chief judge of each Federal judicial district in the Southwest Border region is authorized to appoint additional full-time magistrate judges, who shall have the authority to hear all cases and controversies in the district in which the respective judges are appointed.

As this blog has covered, Operation Streamline is already an enormously expensive proposition.  The increased detention related to criminal prosecutions of border-crossers  has cost more than $1 billion in Texas alone. And that doesn’t include court or defender costs. Some estimates say that a full expansion of Streamline along the Arizona border could cost more than $1 billion in annual court costs and add more than 50,000 new prison beds to the federal detention system.

However, these financial costs, let alone the human costs of incarcerating tens of thousands of non-violent border-crossers, are rarely part of the debate.

Now, we are seeing record prosecutions for immigration violations while national prosecutions of other felonies have actually declined.  According to the report from TRAC:

With federal enforcement increasingly focused on immigration matters, other kinds of felony prosecutions — particularly those brought in districts outside the southwest — have declined, according to a comparison of the first two years under President Obama with the last two years of the Bush administration.

Over this period, the prosecution of all kinds of non-immigration felonies for most parts of the country went down by 6 percent

TRAC also breaks the numbers down to show that the shift towards increasing prosecutions of immigrants is skewing the share of resources dedicated to prosecuting crime in non-border districts:

… with almost no notice to Congress, the American people, various public interest and local law enforcement groups, the Obama administration has implemented a very substantial shift in how it is enforcing federal laws. Four short years ago, slightly more than one-third (36 percent) of federal felony prosecutions were in the five federal districts along the southwest border, while almost two-thirds (64 percent) took place in the rest of the country. Now, while still less than 10 percent of the population lives in those border districts, almost half (47 percent) of all federal felony prosecutions occur there.

The entirety of the report is certainly worth a read.  Find it here.

The chief judge of Arizona’s federal courts has declared a judicial emergency, citing an all-time high of felony cases that has pushed the four judges in Tucson past their limits.
Chief judge John M. Roll wants permission to delay bringing felons to trial. …

Two years ago there were 3,023 felony cases filed in federal court in Arizona. That increased to 4,311 the next year and 5,219 just last year. In just Tucson, felony filings went from 1,564 two years ago to 3,289 last year.

According to data from TRAC (this particular data takes a TRAC Fed subscription to access), it appears that Operation Streamline may be directly contributing to this crisis.  In Arizona for the first 11 months of FY 2010,

Cases were classified by prosecutors into more specific types. The single largest number of prosecutions of these matters through August 2010 was for “Immigration”, accounting for 85.5 percent of prosecutions.

By far the two largest charges were for 1325 “Entry of alien at improper time or place” with 12770  and 1326 “Reentry of deported alien” with 12,452 charges.  1325 illegal entry is generally a misdemeanor while 1326 is always a felony.  The third most prosecuted class of crimes in Arizona were 21 USC 0841 charges related to drug crimes, but that charge only lead with 1,180 cases, a far cry from the 12,452 1326 charges.  Here’s a breakdown of the data from TRAC:

(Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Kenneth) Quillin said the operation will address illegal entries within that target zone and present those individuals apprehended for prosecution. The operational objective of Operation Streamline is to provide a focused prosecutorial effort to all individuals entering illegally into the western border zones.

What that means, Quillin said, is that suspects caught within the area will be taken into custody and brought back to the Yuma Sector the following day, where they will be processed and eventually prosecuted.

The only exceptions will be juveniles and adults accompanied by minor children, depending on the adult’s criminal history.

That last sentence is important as critics of Operation Streamline have often pointed to the lack of protections for asylum-seeking immigrants or those who may have forms of humanitarian immigration relief such as trafficking victims.  Additionally, the article doesn’t address the cost of this expansion.  NPR reported that a full implementation of Operation Streamline could cost as much $1 billion.

The Holy See noted that “Operation Streamline” against irregular migrants should be suspended and asked for information about the Government’s decision to review its position on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

We’ll post updates on whether the Catholic Church in the United States follows this pronouncement with similar statements against Streamline.

Rising backlogs and wait times are a natural consequence of a Department of Homeland Security that prioritizes immigration enforcement over sound policy. Indeed, the report alludes to court decisions stemming some of the more flagrant en masse hearing practices common to Streamline courts. Enforcing the constitutional right of due process (a little bit more than before, at least) without changing prosecution patterns causes burdens on courts to grow with increasing speed. . . exactly as Streamline detractors have been saying for a while now.

Add to this the fact that, for years now, EOIR hasn’t hired enough Immigration Judges to keep up with turnover–some seats that were vacant in 2006 are still empty!–and it’s clear that resources don’t factor into the considerations of those pushing for increased criminalization of immigration.

The report highlights the utility of the Immigration Court Caseload Tool that can now be found on TRAC’s website. The tool allows users to look up pending cases and average wait times by state, court, and hearing location, and by nationality of defendant. The data goes back to 1998 and is updated  frequently.

Using even more recent data than  TRAC’s report, the Immigration Court Caseload Tool calculates that by the end of fiscal year 2010 (September 27), 261,083 cases were awaiting their day in immigration court, the largest backlog U.S. Immigration Courts have ever experienced.