Immigration cases crowd U.S. criminal courts

DALLAS – Osvaldo Compian-Torres is caught in the most significant dragnet in the federal criminal court system. But he isn’t a murderer, drug trafficker or money launderer.

Compian-Torres’ conviction earlier this year in Dallas was for re-entry into the United States after deportation – one of the top two leading charges in federal court prosecutions.

In the first eight months of this fiscal year, about half of new criminal charges in the nation’s courts focused on that charge or the similar entry without inspection, according to an analysis by a Syracuse University research center.

Lawyers call it crimmigration – the fusing of criminal law with immigration law. In the past, those types of immigration issues have usually been handled through civil law or administrative processes.

Some hail use of criminal statutes as an effective deterrent to illegal immigration – and it is a fact that border apprehensions have been dropping. Others say it’s a waste of resources for a nation struggling to prioritize spending and trim the federal budget.

“Have prosecutorial resources been monopolized so that serious felonies aren’t being prosecuted?” asked Don Kerwin, a vice president of the Migration Policy Institute think tank.

Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, another Washington think tank, countered that criminal prosecutions for re-entry are costly but necessary.

“This has been neglected for so long, almost looked on contemptuously by one administration after another,” Krikorian said. “So it is essential to just play catch-up.”

Compian-Torres, 43, a native of Mexico, is awaiting sentencing for his re-entry conviction. The tab for his stay at the federal facility in Seagoville: more than $20,000.

Prosecutions for illegal re-entry increased in the Bush administration at the Texas border in 2005 with a get-tough measure known as Operation Streamline. The tougher prosecutions then spread across the nation.

In the first two years of the Obama administration, illegal re-entry prosecutions outpaced the last two years of the Bush administration, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. The Syracuse University project watches federal government trends through use of the Freedom of Information Act.

For years, foreigners who entered the U.S. illegally were usually deported under civil procedures. That saved taxpayers millions in judicial time, court-appointed attorneys and detention costs, which can range from $60 to $100 a day. But those civil procedures cost elected officials political capital with voters fed up with a porous border.

The criminal statutes for illegal entry and re-entry were on the books for decades. But in 2005, as enforcement ramped up, they made up less than a third of prosecutions.

This month, the White House said it would review deportations for cases considered low priority, such as military veterans and college students with long roots in the U.S. The measure is expected to focus on cases in the immigration courts, rather than those that made it to the criminal courts.

Apprehensions of illegal immigrants by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials are down sharply from nearly 1.2 million in 2005. Only 240,000 apprehensions have been made in the first eight months of this fiscal year.

Some attribute the decline in new illegal immigration to the lack of jobs in the struggling U.S. economy and the doubling in size of the Border Patrol over the last decade.

“Is that a sign that this program (of criminal prosecution) is successful, or has it been overkill?” Kerwin asked.

While border apprehensions dropped, removals in the interior of the U.S. by ICE have held steady at nearly 400,000 for the last two fiscal years.

The number of people unlawfully in the United States is about 11.2 million, about the same as in 2005, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.

That means the number of criminal immigration prosecutions – even at a high of 75,000 – represents only a fraction of the total unlawful population.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say they prioritize resources on immigrants who pose a threat to public safety and national security. ICE spokesman Carl Rusnok said factors used to make prosecution decisions include previous removals, final order for deportation, history of arrests, convictions and severity of crimes.

The illegal re-entry prosecutions are part of a strategy of more stringent enforcement that includes fencing, more Border Patrol and more removals by federal immigration police, he said.

Others question whether “crimmigration” works.

Doug Keller, a former federal public defender in San Diego, said the system creates criminals by prosecution on the felony charge of re-entry, or the misdemeanor charge of entry without inspection.

“Five or six years ago, we would have called them economic migrants,” he said. “They could be spending this money on more important cases.”