HOUSE Republicans pushing an enforcement-first approach to illegal immigration have been silent on one key question: What happens after an immigrant is arrested?
U.S. District Judge Robert C. Brack puts it another way: "You can add Border Patrol agents, but if you do, you'd better think [downstream]. You'd better think marshals; you'd better think prosecutors, probation and pretrial services officers, defense lawyers, judges and clerk's staff -- all of those things."
The problem is that almost no one in Congress is thinking about the effects of tougher immigration enforcement on the federal judiciary system. House-passed legislation does not allocate the money needed to pay for its proposed crackdown on illegal immigrants. Nor does the Senate bill.
Make no mistake, a compromise on the two bills probably will contain enforcement provisions tougher than those now on the books. At a minimum, the Border Patrol will be beefed up. The House bill would add 1,000 agents, the Senate's 2,500 as quickly as possible. How might the increase affect the federal judiciary system?
Of the 69,000 federal criminal cases filed last year, 17,000 were immigration-related. Many were for illegal entry into the United States; human smuggling was the fastest-growing arrest category. In a five-month period in Arizona in 2004, the Border Patrol reported arresting 203,460 unauthorized immigrants. It pursued the prosecution of 2,067 felony and misdemeanor cases. In other words, the government prosecuted one criminal case for every 100 immigrants apprehended.
Prosecuting a larger fraction of the immigrants caught during that period would have put added pressure on the federal judiciary there. But the purpose of adding border agents is to make more arrests and get more convictions. Clearly, at some point, the federal judiciary system would be unable to process the increasing caseload unless significantly buttressed.
Judges would be the first to feel the burden of tougher enforcement. About 1,100 of them sit in the nation's federal district courts, and they are already overworked. (By way of comparison, California alone has 1,399 Superior Court judges.) Federal judges, on average, each have 87 open felony cases before them. In Brack's district in New Mexico, a state hard-hit by illegal immigration, the average caseload is 405. In the Laredo division of Texas' southern federal district, which also is on the frontline of the illegal influx, the average is 1,400.
