Jul 26, 2008

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Illegal Immigrant Convictions – Due Process Violation or Model of Judicial Efficiency?

In case you haven’t heard, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) section of the Department of Homeland Security (yeah, that’s where immigration is now) raided Agriprocessors – a Kosher meatpacking plant in Iowa, and arrested over 300 of its employees.  That’s over 1/3 of Agriprocessor’s workforce and over 10% of the entire population of Postville, where the plant is located.

This raid marks a shift in enforcement policy for immigration.  Usually, when illegal immigrants are caught, they are subject to civil penalties or deportation.  But these workers are faring much worse.  They are being prosecuted and sentenced in federal court.  Over four days, 270 of those arrested were each sentenced to five months in prison and 27 more received probation after pleading guilty to the use of false immigration documents.

A lot of immigration attorneys are up in arms – calling the prosecutions unconstitutional.  From the NY Times:

The unusually swift proceedings, in which 297 immigrants pleaded guilty and were sentenced in four days, were criticized by criminal defense lawyers, who warned of violations of due process. In addition to 260 immigrants sentenced to five months for using false documents, two immigrants were sentenced to one year for that crime and another eight were sentenced to prison for a separate crime, while twenty-seven immigrants received probation. The American Immigration Lawyers Association protested that the workers had been denied meetings with immigration lawyers and that their claims under immigration law had been swept aside in unusual and speedy plea agreements.

The illegal immigrants, most from Guatemala, filed into the courtrooms in groups of 10, their hands and feet shackled. One by one, they entered guilty pleas through a Spanish interpreter, admitting they had taken jobs using fraudulent Social Security cards or immigration documents. Moments later, they moved to another courtroom for sentencing.

The pleas were part of a deal worked out with prosecutors to avoid even more serious charges. Most immigrants agreed to immediate deportation after they serve five months in prison.

The immigration advocates took their case to the hill today.  In a hearing before the Judiciary Committee, attorneys and others noted the speed and language barriers as being obvious warning signs for constitutional violations.  From Jurist:

During the Committee hearing Thursday, American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) [advocacy website] vice-president David Wolfe Leopold reiterated the group’s previous criticism [letter, PDF] of the convictions process, saying [testimony, PDF]:

“A prosecutor’s professional, moral, and ethical duty is to do justice, not merely to convict. This cardinal principal was ignored by the government in its zeal to criminalize undocumented workers. In essence, the expedited justice or “Fast Tracking” system concocted by the government, with the willing assistance of the US District Court for the Northern District of Iowa, was a conviction / deportation assembly line which could not be burdened with protecting the fundamental rights of the defendants, mostly poor uneducated Guatemalan farmers.”Interpreter Erik Camayd-Freixas also criticized the system [testimony, PDF], saying that the immigrants were unable to understand their rights, the charges against them, or the plea bargains to which many finally agreed. The Washington Post has more.

Representatives from both the Department of Justice (DOJ) and ICE [testimony transcripts, PDF] defended the government’s arrest and conviction processes, saying that the immigrants’ constitutional rights were strictly applied. In general, US immigration prosecutions continued to increase in March 2008, jumping nearly 50 percent from the previous month and nearly 75 percent from the previous year, according to a report [text; press release] released by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) [official website] at Syracuse University. Federal immigration prosecutions have risen since February [JURIST report], when such prosecutions hit a record high. TRAC attributed the increase to Operation Streamline [Washington Post backgrounder], a joint federal program under which federal prosecutors levy minor charges against illegal immigrants crossing the US-Mexico border.