When Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced earlier this month he would send 35 more federal prosecutors to districts along the U.S.-Mexico border to focus on prosecuting immigration offenses, it was only the latest salvo in the Trump administration’s war on illegal immigration. The announcement came on the heels of a Justice Department memo last month to prosecutors in border districts, asking them to prosecute more people for immigration offenses.
If the suggestion is that the government before Donald Trump was soft on illegal immigration, the numbers tell a different story.
A Marshall Project analysis of 17 years of federal prison sentences shows that violations of immigration law already constitute the largest category of offenses in the border districts—even more than drug trafficking. Nationally, of the nearly 60,500 people sentenced to federal prison in the last fiscal year, more than 30 percent were convicted of immigration offenses, which can include “illegal re-entry” or people-smuggling. Along the border, immigration took the lead from drug trafficking early in the Obama administration, in some years accounting for more than half of the border districts’ federal prison sentences.
[For more on this story by YOLANDA MARTINEZ, go to https://www.themarshallproject...-prison?ref=hp-1-111]
Comments (0)