Big picture implications of immigration reform

We have noted on this page that both the House and Senate proposals for immigration legislation contain provisions that increase the number of migrants subject to deportation.  The House bill contains broad criminalization provisions that would render all undocumented migrants felons.  The Senate bill is less sweeping, but it further expands the number of crimes that render migrants deportable as “aggravated felons” and bar those migrants from seeking further relief from removal.

There has been little discussion of the implications that this expansion of criminal provisions will have on the criminal justice system as a whole, but it is worth reflecting on the possible impact.  In yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, Charles L. Linder, a past president of the Los Angeles Criminal Bar Association, reminds of an inconvenient truth.  He writes:

U.S. District Judge Robert C. Brack puts it another way: “You can add Border Patrol agents, but if you do, you’d better think [downstream]. You’d better think marshals; you’d better think prosecutors, probation and pretrial services officers, defense lawyers, judges and clerk’s staff — all of those things.”

The problem is that almost no one in Congress is thinking about the effects of tougher immigration enforcement on the federal judiciary system. House-passed legislation does not allocate the money needed to pay for its proposed crackdown on illegal immigrants. Nor does the Senate bill.

As with past immigration legislation, little thought has been given to prioritizing enforcement efforts.  That task will be left to individual prosecutors and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who work to allocated resources across an increasingly expanded bandwidth of criminal immigration provisions.  Linder’s full article is here.

-jmc