What’s the Most-Prosecuted Federal Felony of our Time?
There’s one thing everyone can agree on: the current administration holds the post-Eisenhower record for immigrant deportations. (USA! US…A?) But here’s two views on the practice of “illegal reentry”: it is either harder than ever, or more popular than ever. But — FUN FACT! — it is, according to the Times, for the Feds the most-prosecuted felony of our day!
I heard dramatic tales of hiking for weeks across the Sonoran Desert with skinny donkeys hauling bags of rehydration solution and people paying thousands of dollars to “coyotes” to sneak them over the border. Crossing had become so difficult, in fact, that you couldn’t go back and forth to see your family like you used to. Once in, you stayed, for years, not months, because you knew returning to the United States would be treacherous or impossible. Five years, six, maybe seven. You wired the money home until there was enough for a house, or whatever you needed, and only then could you return to your family. To the people I talked to, a tighter border control was mostly a matter of prolonged homesickness.
— Hecho en América, GQ, October 2011.
Migrant shelters along the Mexican border are filled not with newcomers looking for a better life, but with seasoned crossers: older men and women, often deportees, braving ever-greater risks to get back to their families in the United States — the country they consider home…. Indeed, 56 percent of apprehensions at the Mexican border in 2010 involved people who had been caught previously, up from 44 percent in 2005…. For the Obama administration, these repeat offenders have become a high priority. Prosecutions for illegal re-entry have jumped by more than two-thirds since 2008. Officials say it is now the most prosecuted federal felony.
President Obama has already deported around 1.1 million immigrants — more than any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower — and officials say the numbers will not decline…. Deportation is expensive, costing the government at least $12,500 per person, and it often does not work: between October 2008 and July 22 of this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement spent $2.25 billion sending back 180,229 people who had been deported before and come back anyway. Many more have returned and stayed hidden.
