New DOJ Policy Issued to Enhance Prosecutorial Discretion

We previously posted here about the end to former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s policy of zero tolerance for illegal entry prosecutions. With immigration prosecutions being the most prosecuted category in the Trump Department of Justice, continuing developments at the DOJ are an important piece of immigration policy.

Today Acting Attorney General Monty Wilkinson rescinded a 2017 memo from former AG Sessions on prosecutorial charging policy. In its place, former Attorney General Eric Holder’s May 19, 2010 charging policy has been reinstated.  The new memo stresses that “reasoned exercise of prosecutorial discretion is critical to the fairness, effectiveness, and integrity” of the system, something that professor Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia has published on widely in the immigration field.

The reinstated Holder policy requires that DOJ prosecutors conduct an individualized assessment of relevant facts in making charging and sentencing decisions and ends the Sessions policy that prosecutors must “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offense.”

IE