Report: Number of immigration cases at record levels in US courts in 2009 - latimes.com

Report: Number of immigration cases at record levels in US courts in 2009 - latimes.com

MARK SHERMAN Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — Immigration prosecutions rose to record levels in 2009 as the Obama administration kept up aggressive enforcement that began under President George W. Bush.Nearly 27,000 people faced serious federal charges relating to immigration in 2009, according to Chief Justice John Roberts' annual year-end report on the judiciary. More than three-fourths were accused of illegally re-entering the United States after having been sent home before.Immigration cases increased by about a fifth over the previous year and made up a third of all new criminal filings in U.S. district courts in the government spending year that ended Sept. 30. The statistics were compiled by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.Wendy Sefsaf, spokeswoman for the pro-immigrant Immigration Policy Center, said she expects the number of prosecutions to remain high until Congress passes a law that gives the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants a way to remain in the United States legally."Can we really afford to be spending this kind of time and money locking up people who essentially have come here to work?" Sefsaf said.Roberts's brief report, with no commentary on the numbers, broke with a nearly 40-year tradition of chief justices highlighting the needs of the federal judiciary. Instead, Roberts said the courts "are operating soundly" and tacked on a summary of their caseloads.He also noted that increases in fraud, marijuana trafficking and sex crimes cases helped push the number of criminal cases to the highest level since 1932, the year before the repeal of Prohibition.The number of cases excludes less serious crimes that are handled by federal magistrate judges. In 2008, there were nearly 80,000 immigration cases in all, including those dealt with by magistrate judges, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a private group at Syracuse University.


RAD~Is anyone really surprised that many people return after being deported even if they face likely prosecution? You shouldn't be, often their home, job, spouse and children still remain in the United States? It is fitting that the author mentions prosecutions are now at prohibition levels. When upwards of twelve million people living in the U.S. are in violation of the law and cannot get right with the law except by giving up everything they value - it is a recipe for political and social failure on the scale of prohibition.

Courting Disaster?

Andrew Becker and Hugo Cabrera have done a real nice job with an article on TruthDig about all of the Homeland Security money being spent on Immigration Enforcement Police (ICE/Border Patrol), Prosecutors (DHS) and detention facilities -- and yet the Immigration Courts handled by the Department of Justice are way behind on their caseload and are not growing at anything like the same pace. It looks like trouble for both "due process" and increased enforcement; a real bottleneck in the making. They have called the article "America's approach to immigration is ICE backwards". Click on the title above to go there, or you can reach it through Bender's where I found it:

http://www.bibdaily.com/

Do you know where the immigration court is for New Hampshire? How about for Maine? The Green Mountain State? That's right...the answers are Boston, Boston, and Boston. I have been lobbying to get an immigration judge up here in New Hampshire for about two years now with little success. It really makes no sense to have all of Northern New England fight the Boston traffic to go to court. For some of my clients it can be over 7 hours each way; for most of them there is an extra hour spent in traffic that they could avoid if the court were not located right in government center.

There are two immigration judges from New Hampshire on the bench in Boston and at least one DHS trial attorney who commutes from NH to work everyday -- why not set up a small operation in New Hampshire to handle the cases from Northern New England? There is enough work and there are already an ICE office and a USCIS office in Manchester.

Even as the Immigration Court expands at the JFK federal Building, the other immigration agencies are moving out of downtown. ICE has moved most of it's operation to Burlington, MA, and USCIS is opening a new office in Lawrence, MA that will handle a very significant percentage of Boston's workload. I could use some help with my one man show of trying to get the court to be a little more accomidating to immigrants who have sucessfully managed to cross the border (the border between Massachusetts and New Hampshire that is).

If you would like some additional Obama dollars coming into Northern New England, if you would like to take a small bite out of Boston commuter traffic and correspondingly help the environment, or if you would just like to make the lives of your fellow Northern New Englanders a little easier -- contact your Senators or Representatives. Send an email to Attorney General Eric Holder, Jr. or even to President Obama. Tell them that, as part of the expansion plan for immigration enforcement, Northern New England needs its own immigration court.