U.S. immigration prosecutions fall steeply

WASHINGTON, March 19 (UPI) — Criminal immigration charges filed by U.S. federal prosecutors steeply declined last year, according to new figures.

During November 2006 the Department of Justice reported 2,690 new immigration prosecutions, according to a case-by-case analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, at Syracuse University.

That figure was down nearly 2 percent from the previous month and 18 percent less than the same month in 2005, TRAC said in a statement last week.

But it was still more than twice the number filed in a typical month before Sept. 11, 2001, TRAC said about the figures, which it culled from data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The statement said that might be because the department is counting charges brought in U.S. magistrates’ courts more effectively.

“If magistrate cases are excluded and only federal district court cases are counted, the overall increase in immigration prosecutions (since 2001) is 7.4 percent …,” the statement said.

The recent “slump” in the number of such cases “may mark the end or a slowing in the massive surge that has been recorded by the Bush Administration’s Justice Department since October of 2003,” concluded TRAC.

The figures show that, during November 2006, the Southern District of Texas continued to bring more immigration prosecutions than any other U.S. attorney’s office in the country. Arizona and the Southern District of California each moved up in their rankings from a year ago to be the second and third most active districts. New districts in the top 10 most active in November as compared with one and five years ago were Utah, Colorado, Kansas and the Eastern District of Washington.

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