IMMIGRATION, DRUG CASES JAM FEDERAL DOCKET

Border Effort Strains Courts, Slights White-collar Crimes

DEL RIO -- U.S. District Judge Fred Biery raps his gavel in a
high-tech video center in San Antonio, signaling that court is in
session in this border town more than 100 miles away.

Defendant Arturo Olvera Barrera positions himself in front of Biery's
video image to make a last-ditch plea for leniency. A dozen other
defendants sit out of camera range awaiting their cues to appear in a
two-way video drama spurred by the sharp increase in drug and
immigration cases filed along the Southwest border.

"It would be better if Del Rio had a permanent, resident judge -- or
if peace, love and harmony broke out," said Biery. "But until that
happens this is the way we handle an increased volume of cases with
few resources. This year, I expect to see 1,000 criminal defendants in
Del Rio alone."

Federal crime initiatives along the Southwest border pushed the number
of cases filed to a 57,691 high last year. With California and Texas
logging the biggest increases in criminal filings, both statistics and
geography underscore a definite shift in emphasis from catching bank
robbers and white-collar criminals to prosecuting illegal immigrants
and small-time drug smugglers.

Prosecution of drug and immigration crime -- mostly illegal entry into
the United States -- accounted for a staggering 70 percent of criminal
filings in Texas alone during the 1998 fiscal year that ended Sept.
31.

Federal law enforcement agencies in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and
California began cracking down on illegal immigration and drug crime
in unison five years ago as part of the Southwest Border Initiatives
- -- a national strategy aimed at closing the borders to illegal
immigration and drug smuggling.

Operating under a congressional mandate and with increased funding,
the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has stationed 1,000
additional agents along the border each year for the past three years
and will continue doing so until 2001. And in rural South and West
Texas, heat-sensing devices, infrared cameras and floodlights augment
the efforts of agents who patrol vast expanses of ranch land in
four-wheel-drive vehicles.

From Brownsville to San Diego, the immigration service is using its
INS and Border Patrol agents in dual roles, as gatekeepers and drug
warriors, doubling the agency's filings between 1993 and 1997 in the
process, according to INS statistics.

Last year, the federal courts in Texas posted a 69 percent increase in
the number of drug cases filed and a 58 percent increase in the number
of immigration cases. The increases have strained resources and
personnel in the sparsely populated border areas, said Western
District Clerk Bill Putnicki.

The biggest strain has been in the western and southern districts,
where 84 percent of the state's criminal cases were filed last year.
The western district includes San Antonio and El Paso, while the
southern district stretches from Houston to Brownsville to Laredo.

On the border, "triage" has become a legal term.

Biery begins most days by 5 a.m., balancing a load of 841 pending
cases -- roughly twice the national average caseload for federal
judges. Sentencings are often done en masse, and a bus with barred
windows doubles as a holding cell on busy Monday mornings.

And Putnicki said years of squirreling away extra funds paid off last
year when he added eight court positions -- in the midst of a hiring
freeze -- to handle the nearly 300 percent increase in criminal
filings in El Paso and Del Rio.

Biery decided to try video teleconferencing last year in an effort to
save time and money, but defendants must first agree to waive their
hearing in the same location as the judge. Most do, but Biery and his
staff still make the 1 1/2-hour drive from San Antonio to Del Rio at
least one week out of each month, at times squeezing 50 sentencings
and various hearings onto his crowded border docket.

Maria Jimenez of Houston, director of the American Friends Service
Committee, said the trend toward prosecuting border-crossers instead
of simply deporting them robs immigrants of their human rights.

"These people have a human right to search for jobs, to lift
themselves out of poverty, to make a better life for themselves and
their families," she said. "But this push for criminalizing illegal
immigration is increasing their risk of being abused and exploited."

Jimenez said most of illegal immigrants are not criminals and should
not be treated as such. The majority cross the border in search of
jobs, while others -- like Olvera -- come to visit family members who
are legal residents of the United States, she said.

"All I wanted to do is just to see my son," Olvera tells Biery during
his sentencing. "It was my only motivation to come over here."

Despite the fact that Olvera has no serious criminal history, the
illegal re-entry conviction means he is now a felon. Federal
sentencing guidelines mandate that he will serve nine to 15 months in
federal prison, and Biery gives him the lightest sentence allowed. But
the veteran judge warns Olvera that he could serve 20 years if he is
picked up again.

Olvera's attorney is certain that won't happen. The son Olvera crossed
the Rio Grande River to see was killed in an automobile accident in
Dallas while Olvera was awaiting sentencing. Olvera didn't get to go
to the funeral because the U.S. Marshal's Service was stretched so
thin there was no one to escort him.

Jimenez blamed the shift in law enforcement priority on widespread
anti-immigrant sentiment, which had its roots in California. She and
others believe Congress is using the law as a stop-gap for the social
problems of drug abuse and poverty, instead of looking for a solution.
She and other critics of the Southwest Border Initiatives said the
federal authorities should focus on "real crime."

During 1994, violent and white collar crime made up 37 percent of the
total criminal filings by federal prosecutors in Texas. But that
number shrank to 24 percent last year, even as the total number of
filings mushroomed to 8,168 -- a 41 percent increase over 1997.

John Scalia, with the Bureau of Justice Statistics, said the
priorities of federal law enforcement are often set by the politics of
the time. Ire over the anti-war protests during the Vietnam War fueled
the prosecution of large numbers of draft evaders during the 1970s, he
said.

Ron Woods, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas 1990-93,
said his tenure was dominated by the prosecution of bank officials
after the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. "It was the No. 1
crime problem in the mid-to late '80s and early '90s," he said.

But Woods, who is in private practice in Houston, said the federal
authorities are now pursuing the less complex cases that were once
reserved for the state courts. Prosecutors once concentrated the
almost limitless resources of the federal government on bringing down
drug trafficking organizations; now they go after small-time cases
involving a half-pound of marijuana, he said.

"White-collar crime (in federal court today) is a bank teller who
embezzles $2,000, gets caught by bank security and admits to it. The
U.S. attorneys used to have a cutoff of $50,000-$100,000, but it's
easier to do the smaller cases than to put 10 agents on a complicated
case for a year," he said.

"It's a numbers game. The administration likes to point to the number
of indictments and say they're up. They're tough on crime."

But the numbers no one likes to tally are the cost of prosecution and
incarceration.

Officials with the courts and the U.S. Bureau of Prisons said they do
not have estimates of the increased operating costs since the
Southwest Border Initiatives began. But elected officials in Texas and
other border states have complained that the resulting shortage of bed
space in federal prisons means the states are being asked to foot the
bill for imprisoning illegal immigrants.

During 1998 and 1999, Congress reimbursed less than 60 percent of the
cost of housing federal prisoners convicted of violating immigration
laws, according to a letter from the U.S.-Mexico Border Counties
Coalition, which is seeking reparation from the government.

Congress originally committed to fund the State Criminal Alien
Assistance Program with $650 million a year, but that number has
dwindled to $100 million for fiscal 2000, said the letter signed by El
Paso County Commissioner Carlos Aguilar III and others.

Dan Kesselbrenner, an attorney with the liberal National Immigration
Project of the Lawyers Guild in Boston, questioned the priorities
reflected in the new policies.

"It really is a misallocation of federal resources," he said, "to
devote this much time, money and resources to crimes where there is no
victim, no violence."