Swift Frontier Justice for Migrants Brought to Federal Courts.
TUCSON, Ariz. — They filed into the room seven by seven for a dose of rapid-fire justice: In less than a minute and in quick succession, each migrant pleaded guilty to illegally entering the United States, and was sentenced.
They were overwhelmingly Central American and Mexican men, many of them still in the dusty, sweaty garb they had been wearing when they were caught by Border Patrol agents. They looked dazed, tired and resigned to their fate, many having just completed a harsh trek across the sweltering Mexican desert. Some of their heads drooped as they listened to the judge.
“Good afternoon, my name is Bernardo Velasco, the judge assigned to conduct this proceeding. You are being represented by a lawyer at no cost to you because you are charged with the criminal offense of illegal entry,” the judge told the defendants.
Then he turned to the lawyers: “Counsels, have your clients made a decision to waive their right to a trial and enter guilty pleas?” The lawyers responded in unison, “Yes, your honor.”
The courts near the heavily traveled border in southern Arizona have always trafficked in the immigration, smuggling and narcotics cases that are part and parcel of frontier justice. But President Trump’s new “zero-tolerance” policy calling for criminal prosecution of all those caught illegally crossing the border has swiftly flooded criminal courthouses from Texas to California.
Federal criminal prosecutions of migrants arrested along the southwest border jumped 30 percent in April over March, according to Syracuse University’s TRAC, which monitors cases. Nearly 60 percent of all federal criminal prosecutions in April were for immigration violations, its tallies reveal.
Multiple-defendant immigration hearings have been held for years in Arizona and Texas. The assembly-line justice, known as Operation Streamline, started under President George W. Bush and persisted under President Barack Obama as deportations and other immigration cases were on the rise. But the Trump administration’s new policy of prosecuting cases that previously were most often not a priority is pushing thousands of new defendants into the federal court system.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/us/border-immigration-courts.html?
