Reinventing Immigration Law Enforcement in the Southern District of California

Abstract

For two or more generations, more than 50% of those who attempted to enter the United States illegally did so through the Southern District of California. Each year, up to 600,000 arrests were made here at a porous and largely unguarded border. Most of those arrested were economic migrants. Several thousand, however, were criminal aliens. Seemingly without exception, those who were apprehended provided false names and identification documents to Border Patrol and INS Agents, who often had no way to determine quickly the true identity and criminal background of the arrestee. Adding to these challenges was the fact that the Southern District of California was home to only one federal jail?the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in downtown San Diego. Built to house 456 inmates in 1974 (a capacity later expanded to 607), by 1994, the MCC routinely housed 1200 or more. 72% of the inmates were not U.S. citizens. For years, misdemeanor prosecutions, princi pally for violation of the U.S. Immigration Code, outpaced felony prosecutions in this District by a ratio of 5 to 1. Given limited detention space, misdemeanor prosecutions were preferred?they moved through the system quickly, making limited bed space available for the next misdemeanant. The fact remained, however, that even 5,000 such misdemeanor prosecutions were a de minimis drop in the bucket?595,000 illegal entrants still faced no sanction. It was clear that misdemeanor prosecu tions, even by the thousands, did nothing to stem the tide of illegal immigration. Since each illegal entrant violates federal criminal law merely by entering the United States, it was readily apparent that we could not, even were it deemed desirable, arrest, prosecute, and convict a half million or more people annually. In order to regain control of and reinstitute the rule of law at the border, it was clear that the Govern ment needed to: (1) provide the Border Patrol and INS with the personnel, equipment, and technology required to reduce illegal immigration in the first instance; (2) focus our prosecutorial attention on alien smugglers and on those undocumented aliens who are linked directly to violence and crime in the community; (3) impose an administrative, rather than a criminal, sanction against first-time violators of our immigration laws by expanding the use of the U.S. Immigration Courts; and (4) develop a credible and effective policy of worksite enforcement to discourage U.S. employers from hiring illegal entrants.