Prosecuting Immigration Crimes in the Interior
By Dan Cadman, March 10, 2017
My colleague Joseph Kolb has written a valuable blog post on how important it is to use prosecution of immigration crimes as one tool in the arsenal to combat illegal immigration to the United States.
In his post, he discusses the Border Patrol's "consequence delivery system" (CDS) — a mapped-out table of ways to ensure that illegal immigration at the border is met with timely and appropriate consequences, one of which is to promptly prosecute offenders.
[ICE Arrests]
That system was the subject of political meddling during the prior administration, which sought to mitigate away many of the consequences in its desire to render the tidal wave of illegal immigration by unaccompanied minors and whole families both benign and invisible to the public eye. For example, under the Obama administration the "most effective/efficient consequence" for family unit apprehensions was deemed to be issuance of a notice to appear (NTA) at an undetermined date in the future at an immigration court — even though with backlogs of over 500,000 cases, in practical terms this ensured that family units were assured of remaining in the United States up to three years or even longer while awaiting their hearing, even though statistics clearly show that the rate of absconders in such units is extraordinarily high. By contrast, in the Obama version of the CDS, voluntary return for family units, was deemed least desirable/effective. (See figure 3 in this Government Accountability Office report.) In other words, the CDS was manipulated to stand logic on its head even as the flow of alien minors and family units continued across our southern border in the tens of thousands for several years.
http://cis.org/cadman/prosecuting-immigration-crimes-interior
