Few ideas garner less support in this country than the suggestion that immigration enforcement should be relaxed.
And few ideas garner less support than the suggestion that the federal government needs to be bigger, but its hard to draw any other conclusion from the overwhelming backlog of immigration cases facing federal courts.
So Immigration and Customers Enforcement prosecutors are reviewing cases to determine which ones can be placed on low-priority status a move which, realistically, may mean they are never prosecuted.
The goal is to clear the way for prosecutions of undocumented immigrants with criminal backgrounds and those deemed to threaten national security.
The problem comes in part because ICE is doing a better job of identifying violators and moving the most dangerous among them through the system. In 2007, Homeland Security began using fingerprint databases to identify and deport criminals and repeat immigration offenders. In the next four years, the number of those cases jumped dramatically. Meanwhile, other cases languished.
We simply cannot adjudicate all the cases that are pending, Denver ICE spokeswoman Barbara Gonzales told the Associated Press. She said that some cases in Denver date to 1996.
Opponents, though, consider the prioritization review a back-door way of granting amnesty. Although there are technical differences in legal status (which should be troubling to defendants), its difficult to argue that the result wont be essentially the same.
Its even more difficult, though, to reject the idea that, in the face of limited resources, some violators require more serious action than do others. A meat-packing employee without a work permit (and an employer willing to look the other way) may harm citizens chances to be hired, but a Zeta poses a threat of an entirely different magnitude.
Short of adding enforcement personnel, prosecutors, courts and even detention facilities which is undeniably expensive and adds up to a very large governmental agency its hard to imagine what else the government might do. Although a sizeable portion of the public believes that immigration violations can be handled simply and quickly, mainly by busing undocumented individuals to the border, the process is more complicated than that. Without more structure in place to expedite cases, the backlog will continue to grow.
As upset as many Americans are (or were, not too long ago) about immigration, they arent likely to believe that bigger government is the answer.
Unpalatable though it indeed is, the current effort seems like a sensible plan to deal first with the most serious aspects of a big, complex problem, especially since ICE prosecutors have considerable experience in predicting how a judge would rule if a case ever reached that stage. Let them save their energies for the important cases and decide, within common-sense guidelines, to push some others out of the way. That has long been the strongest argument for amnesty: to clear the decks for a better way dealing with immigration. In at least a small way, this would help accomplish that.
