PUSH ON IMMIGRATION CRIMES IS SAID TO SHIFT FOCUS

LAREDO, Tex. -- Inside a courthouse just north of the Rio Grande,
federal judges mete out prison sentences to throngs of 40 to 60
illegal immigrants at a time. The accused, mostly from Central
America, Brazil and Mexico, wear rough travel clothes that speak of
arduous journeys: flannel shirts, sweat suits, jeans and running
shoes or work boots.

The prosecutors make quick work of the immigrants. Under a Justice
Department program that relies on plea deals, most are charged with
misdemeanors like improper entry.

Federal prosecutions of immigration crimes nearly doubled in the last
fiscal year, reaching more than 70,000 immigration cases in the 2008
fiscal year, according to federal data compiled by a Syracuse
University research group. The emphasis, many federal judges and
prosecutors say, has siphoned resources from other crimes, eroded
morale among federal lawyers and overloaded the federal court system.
Many of those other crimes, including gun trafficking, organized
crime and the increasingly violent drug trade, are now routinely
referred to state and county officials, who say they often lack the
finances or authority to prosecute them effectively.

Bush administration officials say the government's focus on
immigration crimes is an outgrowth of its counterterrorism strategy
and vigorous pursuit of immigrants with criminal records.

Immigration prosecutions have steeply risen over the last five years,
while white-collar prosecutions have fallen by 18 percent, weapons
prosecutions have dropped by 19 percent, organized crime prosecutions
are down by 20 percent and public corruption prosecutions have
dropped by 14 percent, according to the Syracuse group's statistics.
Drug prosecutions -- the enforcement priority of the Reagan, first
Bush and Clinton administrations -- have declined by 20 percent since 2003.

"I have seen a national abdication by the Justice Department," said
Attorney General Terry Goddard of Arizona.

United States attorneys on the Southwest border, who handle the bulk
of immigration prosecutions, usually decline to prosecute drug
suspects with 500 pounds of marijuana or less -- about $500,000 to
$800,000 worth. As a result of Washington's decision to forgo many of
those cases, Mr. Goddard said, local agencies are handling many of
them and becoming overwhelmed.

Peter Carr, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said that felony
prosecutions of immigration crimes had increased 40 percent from 2000
through 2007 but that most other prosecutions had remained steady.
But Justice Department statistics Mr. Carr provided to The New York
Times did not include tens of thousands of misdemeanor charges and
prosecutions conducted before magistrate judges. Data from the
Syracuse group, known as the Transactional Records Access
Clearinghouse, or TRAC, included those cases, which are driving the
sharp growth in immigration cases.

Prosecutorial priorities are expected to change after President-elect
Barack Obama takes office, said Mark Agrast, a senior fellow at the
Center for American Progress, a liberal research and policy institute
that is closely associated with the transition team. "There will be a
reassessment of whether aggressive targeting of criminal aliens
through the use of federal criminal statues is an effective use of
scarce law enforcement resources," Mr. Agrast said.

The Bush administration bolstered its enforcement of immigration
crimes by increasing the number of Border Patrol agents from 9,500 in
2004 to 15,000 in 2008 and adding several hundred federal prosecutors
assigned to immigration crimes.

On heavy days, single courtrooms along the border process illegal
immigrants on an industrial scale, sometimes more than 200 in a day.
Misdemeanors usually carry a sentence of a few weeks to six months.

At the federal courthouse in Laredo, George P. Kazen, the senior
judge, estimated that under Operation Streamline, the Justice
Department program relying on plea deals for efficiency, he had
sentenced more people to prison than any other active federal judge.
But Judge Kazen said he was concerned about recent reports of the
smuggling of firearms from Texas into Mexico by violent drug cartels.

"The U.S. attorney isn't bringing me those cases," he said. "They're
just catching foot soldiers coming across the border. They bust some
stooge truck driver carrying a load of drugs, and you know there's
more behind it. But they will tell you that they don't have the
resources to drive it and develop a conspiracy case."

"Every time the government puts a lot of resources on one thing,
they're going to take away from another," he added.

Mr. Carr of the Justice Department disagreed, saying that other
prosecutions had remained steady, and he defended the emphasis on
immigration. "The Department has answered the call of Congress and
the states along the Southwest border to pursue immigration
enforcement aggressively."

The debate over Justice Department priorities is loudest in this
region, as local authorities facing dwindling resources are picking
up cases federal prosecutors decline, especially the marijuana cases.

"We do reach a saturation point, so we set thresholds as to what type
of cases we will work," said Tim Johnson, acting United States
attorney for the Southern District of Texas. "To the extent that we
don't have resources, we will refer them to local agencies."

Drug traffickers now routinely break up their loads into smaller
quantities to avoid stiffer federal penalties, law enforcement authorities say.

Thomas O'Sullivan, the chief criminal deputy county attorney in Santa
Cruz County, Ariz., said that county prosecutors had begun to decline
federal agents' case referrals out of necessity.

In neighboring Pima County, which includes Tucson, Barbara LaWall,
the county attorney, said she continued to take on federal cases but
did know how much longer she would be able to do so.

"We're prosecuting Border Patrol cases, national park cases, customs
cases, D.E.A. cases -- any cases in which they have 499 pounds of
marijuana or less, because I don't want the drug dealers to have no
consequences whatsoever," Ms. LaWall said. "But the rock and the hard
place is that my jurisdiction, as most others are, is experiencing
some real financial downturns."

Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who is a frequent
critic of Justice Department priorities, said that federal agents
also complained often to her about delays in wiretap requests, a
hallmark of the kind of complex investigations that used to be a
mainstay of federal cases.

"They've pulled so many U.S. attorneys off drug crimes and organized
crime caseloads that federal agents are trying to get help from local
district attorneys because they can't wait six weeks for a wiretap
order," Ms. Lofgren said. "By then it's too late to catch the bad guys."

Federal agents requested 457 wiretaps in 2007, a 14-year low.
Meanwhile, state and local prosecutors requested 1,751 wiretaps, more
than triple the number in 1993.

Some local prosecutors say they are glad to take on the kinds of
challenging cases that federal prosecutors used to handle. Ms. LaWall
boasted about a racketeering conspiracy she recently prosecuted
involving millions of dollars in illegal methamphetamine sales in
Arizona. But Damon Mosler, the San Diego district attorney's narcotic
division chief, said financial constraints often limited his office's
ability to do things, like assisting federal agents monitoring drug
trafficking organizations.

"That sometimes means I can't keep supporting those other
jurisdictions," Mr. Mosler said.

Mr. Goddard, the Arizona attorney general, said the impact of the
Justice Department's focus on immigration crime extended beyond the drug war.

"Where they used to be big players in environmental law, antitrust
law, and consumer fraud -- now the states are the ones taking on
these kinds of cases," Mr. Goddard said. "These used to be uniquely
federal in nature because they are going after multistate
institutions conducting cross-border schemes."

Carol C. Lam, a former United States attorney for the Southern
California District and now a deputy general counsel for Qualcomm,
was ousted in 2007 after Justice Department officials said she did
not prosecute enough illegal immigrants. Ms. Lam, who was involved in
the corruption case of Randy Cunningham, a former California
Republican congressman now serving federal prison time, said her
philosophy led her to choose high-impact cases instead of cases that
simply "drove the statistics."

"If two-thirds of a U.S. attorney's office is handling low-level
narcotics and immigration crimes," she said, "young prosecutors may
not have the opportunity to learn how to do a wiretap case, or learn
how to deal with the grand jury, or how to use money laundering
statutes or flip witnesses or deal with informants and undercover
investigations."

"That's not good law enforcement," she said.

A senior federal prosecutor who has worked on a wide variety of cases
along the border said that the focus on relatively simple immigration
prosecutions was eroding morale at United States attorney offices.

"A lot of the guys I work with did nothing but the most complex cases
- -- taking down multigenerational crime families, international crime,
drug trafficking syndicates -- you know, big fish," said the
prosecutor, who did not want to be identified as criticizing the
department he works for. "Now these folks are dealing with these
improper entry and illegal reentry cases." He added, "It's
demoralizing for them, and us