PHOENIX — President Barack Obama’s $600 million border-security plan seems to have it all — more than 1,000 agents, seven gunrunner teams, five FBI task forces, and more prosecutors and immigration judges.
But it doesn’t include $40 million to help the already overwhelmed federal courts along the U.S.-Mexico border that will probably be inundated with additional drug and other criminal cases, according to a judiciary official.
Increased patrols will mean more arrests and more cases sent to the five district courts on the border, from California to Texas. The courts handle cases including drug trafficking, smuggling and illegal immigrants charged with other serious crimes.
“The current workload in our Southwest border courts is staggering,” said James Duff, director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts.
Soaring caseload feared
Duff said the judiciary asked Congress for the $40 million on June 22 after realizing it wasn’t sent with Obama’s plan. White House spokesman Luis Miranda said the request wasn’t submitted with the president’s because the judiciary is a separate branch of government.
Obama’s plan does include more money for immigration judges, who operate in the executive branch. But those judges deal almost exclusively with civil deportation matters, not criminal cases, like the district courts.
The chief judge for the District of Arizona in Tucson, located in what has become the busiest corridor for illegal immigration and drug smuggling, said he fears increased patrols will bring even more cases to his already swamped court.
“If you have more agents in the field, they’re going to make more apprehensions. . . . Being here on the ground in the middle of everything happening, we would have to have more resources if they’re going to bring us more cases,” said Judge John Roll.
Born of desperation
Last fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, nearly 2,700 of the district’s more than 5,200 criminal cases involved immigration, Roll wrote in a letter this month to a handful of lawmakers on appropriations committees. He said judges work long hours and take cases home on weekends and while they travel.
Judges in the five border courts handle hundreds more cases than most of their counterparts in the rest of the country. The system became so overrun with pot busts, for example, that until recently, federal prosecutors in Arizona generally declined to press charges against marijuana smugglers caught with less than 500 pounds.
The increase in immigration cases since 2005 can be attributed to increased law enforcement and a Border Patrol initiative to arrest and prosecute illegal immigrants in federal courts on charges of illegal entry, rather than sending them to an immigration judge for civil deportation proceedings.
Combined, the border districts handled nearly 75 percent of criminal immigration cases in the nation’s 94 districts in fiscal year 2009 and almost 40 percent of all the nation’s federal criminal-case filings, Duff said.
Duff said his office was not trying to get the $40 million to “feather our own nests. We’re doing this basically out of desperation for our courts.”
