EXPANDED BORDER POLICING CLOGS THE COURTS AND JAILS

EDINBURG, Tex. -- Five years after the Clinton administration
and the Republican-led Congress began an enormous law enforcement
buildup along the Mexican border to fight the war on drugs and illegal
immigration, federal and state courts are buckling under the strain of
the resulting criminal caseload. The unprecedented numbers of new drug
and immigration indictments are inundating the five federal judicial
districts along the nearly 2,000-mile border that stretches from the
mouth of the Rio Grande in Texas to San Diego. Those now handle 26
percent of all federal criminal filings in the United States. The
remaining 74 percent is spread among the country's remaining 89
district courts.

Federal judges along the border are struggling with caseloads double
to quadruple the national average. Judges on senior status who would
otherwise have retired are hearing clogged dockets, while visiting
judges are being brought in from as far away as Vermont.

In border cities like Del Rio, Tex., and Las Cruces, N.M., the
caseload is nearly twice the national average, yet neither city has a
sitting federal district judge.

In Washington today, a bipartisan group of lawmakers announced an
emergency appropriation of $12 million to compensate state district
attorneys along the border who have seen their dockets and their jails
clogged by smaller drug cases handed off by federal prosecutors.
District attorneys in Texas, who represent some of the poorest
counties in the nation, had threatened to refuse all federal drug
cases as of July 1, unless the government began reimbursing them for
the costs.

The clogged courts further illustrate the difficulty and complexity of
policing the Mexican border, which remains the primary entry point for
drugs and illegal immigrants into the United States. The strategy of
building up federal law enforcement along the border has brought
increases in drug seizures and in the arrests of illegal immigrants,
but the flow of both is continuing.

Since 1994, the number of United States Border Patrol and Immigration
and Naturalization Service personnel has nearly doubled. This
heightened presence has created a spike in criminal cases along the
border, to 14,517 in 1998 from 6,460 in 1994. But the size of the
court system has remained essentially the same; judicial resources in
the five border districts have increased by only 4 percent.

"Everybody talks about the war on drugs," said Representative
Silvestre Reyes, a Democrat representing El Paso who has pushed for
more resources. "They want to put in additional border patrol agents,
I.N.S. agents and customs agents without giving any thought to what
happens to a case when it's generated."

To some degree, the disparity in funding reflects a historical
reluctance by Congress to expand the judiciary, said Eric E. Sterling,
president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, a Washington
group that studies issues like drug policy. Mr. Sterling said Congress
had traditionally been eager to finance drug enforcement efforts but
less enthusiastic about creating new judgeships because they are
powerful, politically appointed positions.

Still, Congress seems to be taking notice of the problems on the
border. Last fall, Congress authorized three new judgeships in
Arizona, though the positions remain unfilled.

In June, a bipartisan group of border-state senators, including the
Republicans Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico and Kay Bailey Hutchison of
Texas and the Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California, introduced
legislation to authorize 13 more judgeships along the border. The bill
provides for eight permanent and five temporary positions, and
sponsors are trying to insert the measure in the regular
appropriations bill for the coming fiscal year.

"Everyone on both sides of the aisle acknowledges that this is a
crisis," Senator Hutchison said. "We've just got to have help."

She said courts were just one part of a growing crisis on the border,
where in recent weeks frustrated ranchers in Arizona have begun
rounding up illegal immigrants trespassing on their land.

"Everything has been too little, too late," Senator Hutchison said.
"We've had a very difficult time getting control of what's happened on
the border."

Here in Hidalgo County in South Texas, where the Border Patrol
presence along the Rio Grande has sharply increased, state and federal
courts are inundated. George P. Kazen, chief judge of the Southern
Judicial District of Texas, said Del Rio had more than 1,000 criminal
cases every year, but no sitting district judge. Visiting judges from
Louisiana have been called on to reduce the caseload.

"The point is that there is no sense to having a huge influx of law
enforcement officers if you're not going to pay corresponding
attention to what you're going to do with offenders after you pick
them up," Judge Kazen said.

The volume of new cases has created friction between federal and state
prosecutors in Texas. Immigration cases fall solely under federal law,
but state prosecutors are handling more and more drug arrests made by
federal agents. Federal prosecutors usually prosecute the larger
seizures and refer smaller cases to state courts. In South Texas, the
United States attorney Mervyn Mosbacker said his office refered about
500 cases a year to state prosecutors, most of them involving
marijuana seizures of less than 60 pounds.

But the cost of prosecuting those cases provoked a rebellion by
district attorneys on the Texas border, who had threatened to stop
taking federal cases on July 1. Hidalgo County's district attorney,
Rene A. Guerra, estimated that such cases cost taxpayers in his county
about $1 million annually. His criminal caseload has risen to 3,246
indictments last year from 2,233 in 1995 . Jaime Esparza, the district
attorney in El Paso, said his office spent more than $2 million. And
increasingly, Mr. Esparza said, his office is handling offenders
arrested with more than 100 pounds of marijuana.

The announcement today of the emergency $12 million, which is expected
to become law soon as part of a larger military appropriations bill,
put an end, for now, to the plans for the boycott. But Mr. Esparza
emphasized in an interview earlier this week the burden placed on El
Paso and other border areas.

"You can't expect these border counties, which are some of the poorest
counties in the country, to continue to pay these costs," Mr. Esparza
said. "It's like double taxation. No other place in the country has to
shoulder these costs, and it's only because of our proximity to the
border."

Another problem is the lack of jail and prison space. There are no
federal detention centers along the Southwest border, so federal
detainees are held in local jails. In vast West Texas, defendants are
often bused hundreds of miles to jails with space. In New Mexico,
Chief Judge John Edwards Conway said, the federal courts pay local
jails $18,000 a day for 300 beds. Over all, Judge Conway said, the
number of federal criminal defendants in New Mexico rose to 1,700 in
1999 from 800 in 1998.

Most judges disputed any suggestion that the caseload diminished the
quality of justice meted out. But Carolyn Dineen King, chief judge of
the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which
includes Texas, did express a concern.

"What you worry about," Judge King said, is defendants who get shorter
sentences than they deserve "because the court simply has to move the
case.".