Oct. 3, 2005 – Federal law enforcement has increasingly turned its gaze on immigration violations in the years since George W. Bush ascended to the presidency, leading to a record number of prosecutions last year, according to a report released yesterday by a private research firm. Much of the impetus for the policy shift came about at urging by the Department of Homeland Security, a related report notes.
Federal prosecutions of immigration crimes jumped from 16,310 in 2001 to 37,854 last year, according to the study by Transactional Records Access Clearing House, a private firm affiliated with Syracuse University.
Prosecutors also nearly doubled the number of cases they pursued involving weapons-related crimes during the Bush years, from 6,507 in 2001 to a high of 10,937 in 2004, the report says.
According to the Rights Working Group, a coalition of civil and immigrant rights organizations, the effect US immigration policy has on individuals and families cannot be understated.
"At stake for these individuals and their families are some of the most important issues in their lives, including preservation of family unity," the coalition said in a policy statement. "This is especially true in deportation proceedings, where an ill-considered decision can result in a person?s removal to a country he has not lived in since childhood, where he has no relatives or familiarity with the language, or still worse, where he may be exposed to the risk of persecution, torture, or even death."
In addition to measuring federal law enforcement pursuit of immigration crimes, the TRAC study compiled data on prosecution filings, sentencing and related criminal justice information in four other categories of crime: white collar, weapons, drug-related and terrorism. The organization gathered data and documents for a time period stretching back to 1993 through a number of Freedom of Information Act filings, according to the report.
As a whole, prosecutions under the Bush administration have jumped by 30 percent, TRAC found. While the prosecution of immigration violations and gun crimes nearly doubled between 2001 and 2004, white-collar criminal prosecutions -- the smallest category ? fell by nearly 20 percent, and drug prosecutions fell only slightly.
Meanwhile prosecution of "terrorism-related" crimes increased from 115 in 2001 to 1,208 in 2002 and back down to 738 in 2004.
In late August, the study?s authors released a related report solely assessing immigration arrest data. According to that report, Homeland Security has been pushing for a greater focus on violations of immigration law, ostensibly as a means of defending the nation against terrorists.
Responding to the news, Marshall Fitz, associate director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the report showed a tighter focus on immigration under Bush than recent administrations, Cox News reports. But, Fitz said, "These dramatically ramped-up enforcement efforts haven't done anything to correct the ultimate problem, which is that we have a fundamentally broken immigration system."
And the Department appears to be getting its way. Conviction rates for DHS-pushed immigration violations top all other federal crime categories in successful convictions, according to the report. While convictions are sentencing is on the rise for undocumented immigrants, the length of sentences has remained flat and even dropped in many cases.
Immigration enforcement now makes up a third of prosecutions at the federal level. The report found that a single federal judicial district in southern Texas accounted for the largest spike in immigration arrests and prosecution filings.
Still, immigrants continue to pour into the nation, albeit in slightly lower numbers than previously. According to a recent Pew Hispanic Center study, 1.2 million immigrants --both documented and undocumented -- entered the US in 2004, marking a rise of about 100,000 people from 2003 but an overall decline of 400,000 since 1999.
