Trump ramps up criminal charges against migrants in California
By Alicia A Caldwell and Myles Miller Bloomberg The Trump administration is filing criminal charges against more immigrants in the US illegally as part of an effort to skirt state and city policies that limit local cooperation The effort is starting in California where prosecutors are tracking everyone booked into state and local jails in a seven-county region They re looking for foreigners who have been previously deported in order to charge them with a felony for re-entering the US without permission stated Bill Essayli the US Attorney for the Central District of California which includes Los Angeles Related Articles Opinion Californians insist that immigrants deserve a path to citizenship Man facing deportation charged with assaulting ICE officer in San Jose Greater part AAPI adults oppose college funding cuts and candidate deportations a new poll finds After traveling the boundary for better schools specific parents are pulling their kids and leaving the US US immigration bureaucrats appear to have begun deporting newcomers to South Sudan attorneys say Under Operation Guardian Angel federal prosecutors have filed about criminal arrest warrants for foreigners arrested on state or local charges in the area since January compared with about during all of and Essayli mentioned in a interview Being a foreigner in the US without permission isn t a crime per se but those caught passing the frontier illegally can be charged with a misdemeanor or felony if they ve been caught and deported before Anyone caught in the interior of the country after being deported can also be charged with a felony We re going to file on anyone and everyone who qualifies under the statute Essayli declared We ve got the information and the administration has made it clear support will not be an issue for immigration-enforcement operations The warrants supplant previously relied-on detainer requests sent to local jails asking functionaries to hold someone on civil immigration charges Multiple jurisdictions around the US have in latest years stopped responding to those requests arguing that local and state authorities have no authority to enforce the administrative immigration notices California has statewide policies that generally bar local government from honoring those detainer requests The new warrants Essayli noted will ensure that foreigners in local jails will be turned over to federal personnel to face assertions that they came back to the US without permission Zero Tolerance Successive administrations from both parties have routinely filed misdemeanor and felony charges for settlers caught at the perimeter During the first Trump administration the Justice Department launched a zero-tolerance initiative and pledged to prosecute nearly every adult caught bridging the perimeter illegally expanding a activity launched by former President George W Bush and used in one section along the Texas perimeter The mass-prosecution effort which included the administration s controversial family-separation initiative was short lived and rapidly overwhelmed federal courts along the confines Since then prosecutors have returned to generally charging those with criminal histories and those previously expelled Essayli described his California judicial district as a testing ground for the focus on criminal charges and mentioned federal leadership want to expand the effort to other so-called sanctuary cities and states Our primary goal is to keep the constituents safe that s one of administration s preponderance sacred responsibilities Essayli noted The administration has made it clear we re getting back to basics targeting violent organized crime transnational criminal organizations and fraudsters who victimize innocent people More stories like this are available on bloomberg com Bloomberg L P
