But President Donald Trump has doubled down on immigration prosecutions, seeing it as a way to draft the Justice Department into his immigration crackdown. But illegal entry prosecutions are still taking up half of the federal criminal courts’ workload. The memo asked U.S. attorneys in the Southwest to submit plans outlining how they’d go after misdemeanor illegal entry cases. “Isn’t the reality of the situation that the Justice Department is ICE?” Erendira Castillo, an attorney who has represented defendants facing immigration prosecutions for two decades in Tucson, told HuffPost. Nationwide, misdemeanor illegal entry cases spiked 448 percent in February, compared to the year before.

Source: Huffington Post April 26, 2018 17:26 UTC