Roque Planas reports for HuffPost:
When Tim Purdon became U.S. attorney for North Da kota in 2010, he had a priority: improving public safety on the state’s four Indian reservations. Prosecuting violent crimes on Indian reservations falls to the Justice Department, and Purdon himself had worked similar cases as a public defender before taking on the U.S. attorney job.
But when Purdon took office, he found that more than a third of his criminal caseload consisted of immigration prosecutions, even though North Dakota lies more than 1,000 miles from the border with Mexico. Despite the state’s proximity to Canada, the defendants were by and large Latin Americans who’d been caught in the U.S. after getting deported. The cases were easy to win. All prosecutors needed was to present paperwork proving the prior deportation. But the cases sapped time away from Purdon’s prosecutors, whom he’d have rather tasked with crimes on the reservations or white-collar cases.
That all happened under the Obama administration. But President Donald Trump has doubled down on immigration prosecutions, seeing it as a way to draft the Justice Department into his immigration crackdown. Earlier this month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced what he called a “zero tolerance” policy on immigration crime, directing all U.S. attorneys in the four Southwestern border states to prosecute every misdemeanor illegal border-crossing case “to the extent practicable.”
Purdon was livid.
“If you’re working on a misdemeanor illegal entry case, as a matter of fact, you are not working on something more serious,” Purdon, who left office in 2015, told HuffPost. “It is a net drain on the scarce resources of U.S. attorneys. Full stop.”
Despite Trump’s insistence that the border is in “crisis,” illegal entries from Mexico have hit their lowest level since 1971. But illegal entry prosecutions are still taking up half of the federal criminal courts’ workload. If Sessions gets his way, that percentage will continue to increase: Every U.S. attorney in the country will be doing more of the same work that Purdon complained about, and the five U.S. attorneys whose districts touch the southwest border will take on increasingly petty cases to keep the numbers up.
“We want to achieve this zero tolerance across the border and we are redirecting resources,” Sessions told a House Appropriations subcommittee on Thursday.
. . . .
“Isn’t the reality of the situation that the Justice Department is ICE?” Erendira Castillo, an attorney who has represented defendants facing immigration prosecutions for two decades in Tucson, told HuffPost. “Let’s call a spade a spade.”
. . . .
Doubling down on such small potatoes cases might make sense if the Justice Department did an effective job confronting more serious crimes. But its track record on more complex investigations doesn’t always inspire confidence.
Some 9 million Americans lost their homes in the aftermath of the 2007 housing and financial crisis. Despite widespread allegations that fraudulent and predatory behavior on the part of banks and peddlers of predatory mortgages drove that crisis, the Justice Department secured a conviction in only one major case against an investment banker.
That institutional failure wasn’t a fluke — it’s also a reflection of the Justice Department’s priorities. As the number of immigration prosecutions grew by a factor of 11 over the last two decades, the number of prosecutions for white-collar crime in federal court plummeted by 41 percent, according to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. The steady decline continued in 2017, Sessions’ first year as attorney general.
“DOJ’s real amnesty policy,” said Matt Stoller, a fellow with anti-monopolization nonprofit Open Markets Institute, “was for white-collar executives.”