When Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced earlier this month he would send 35 more federal prosecutors to districts along the U.S.-Mexico border to focus on prosecuting immigration offenses, it was only the latest salvo in the Trump administration’s war on illegal immigration. The announcement came on the heels of a Justice Department memo last month to prosecutors in border districts, asking them to prosecute more people for immigration offenses.
If the suggestion is that the government before Donald Trump was soft on illegal immigration, the numbers tell a different story.
A Marshall Project analysis of 17 years of federal prison sentences shows that violations of immigration law already constitute the largest category of offenses in the border districts—even more than drug trafficking. Nationally, of the nearly 60,500 people sentenced to federal prison in the last fiscal year, more than 30 percent were convicted of immigration offenses, which can include “illegal re-entry” or people-smuggling. Along the border, immigration took the lead from drug trafficking early in the Obama administration, in some years accounting for more than half of the border districts’ federal prison sentences.
Of the 94 federal court districts, the Southern and Western Districts of Texas send the most people to prison for these offenses—more than 8,000 last year where the length of length of the prison term was reported. Arizona and California also saw recent rises. In New Mexico the raw numbers are smaller, but immigration accounts for 76 percent of the new prison sentences that were handed down in the 2016–2017 federal fiscal year.
Federal courts have been sending fewer people to prison in recent years, and immigration sentences have fallen from their peak in 2011, but they still grew last year to almost 18,500 nationwide.
The data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission only include the first nine months of the Trump Administration, but the early indications are that imprisonment for violating immigration laws is again on the rise.