NEW: Federal drug-trafficking prosecutions along the Southwest border plunged to their lowest point in almost two decades as the Trump administration launched a “zero tolerance” crackdown on minor immigration crimes, separating thousands of families.
usatoday.com/story/news/inv…
usatoday.com/story/news/inv…
President Trump said that “my Department of Justice will be seeking so many much tougher penalties than we’ve ever had.” But DOJ and court records show the feds were taking fewer suspected traffickers to court than at any point since the border buildup began in 2001.
We found evidence that some big drug seizures aren’t ending up in federal court, where penalties are most severe. In June, border agents caught a man with more than 20kg of cocaine at a California crossing, but turned the case over to local authorities instead of DOJ.
One explanation for that: The zero-tolerance crackdown flooded some parts of the federal justice system with thousands of new, mostly minor, criminal cases. In some federal courts, the criminal caseload tripled in just a few weeks.
The zero-tolerance immigration cases are largely symbolic. They’re misdemeanors; most end in people being sentenced to no jail time and a $10 fee. But they were the mechanism for separating thousands of migrants from their children. usatoday.com/story/news/201…
Prosecutors had warned of this outcome. We reported in June year that a DOJ official in San Diego told border authorities his office would have to “divert” resources away from smuggling prosecutions to deal with new, low-level immigration cases. usatoday.com/story/news/201…
A former @ICEgov official says the Obama administration considered expanding low-level immigration prosecutions. But DOJ consistently rejected it because those cases would drain resources from other priorities.
DOJ insists that hasn’t actually happened. But its case-management records show that prosecutors who previously handled some drug-trafficking and other smuggling cases had been assigned to handle hundreds of immigration misdemeanors.
The story's here -> usatoday.com/story/news/inv…
Meanwhile, there's no evidence that drug-traffickers are giving up. DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told Trump in August that agents "interdict more and more drugs at the border each month."
When AG Jeff Sessions launched the zero-tolerance policy, he said "failure to enforce our duly-enacted laws would be an affront to the American people and a threat to our very system of self-government." (He was talking about illegal-entry misdemeanors.)
justice.gov/opa/speech/att…
justice.gov/opa/speech/att…
And in case anybody needs it ->
