PRIORITIES, PRIORITIES

Trump Crackdown Is Driving Surge in Immigration Cases Over Other Major Crimes

Immigration cases are taking over the court system as President Donald Trump reshapes federal law enforcement.

Federal fraud and drug cases have plunged as President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown clogs up the court system, according to the Financial Times.

U.S. federal prosecutors have filed 6,991 new criminal immigration cases since Jan. 20, a 237 percent jump on the same period last year, the FT analysis of CourtListener data shows.

The surge is part of a broader operation in which masked federal teams have raided farms, construction sites, and factories, sparking large protests where National Guard soldiers have used tear gas and rubber bullets.

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Fraud prosecutions are down 17 percent, and drug filings have dropped 27 percent in the same period, driving them lower than immigration cases for the first time in two decades, the newspaper reports.

The dramatic shift highlights how the administration has re-engineered federal priorities during Trump’s second term.

Heidi Altman, vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center, told the FT that criminal prosecutions were “a way that the administration can layer additional penalties and punishments.”

“If the agenda is to deport people and you want people to give up and agree to it, threatening them with jail time is one way to do that,” she said.

The Department of Justice said its own internal tracking also showed a 112 percent rise in immigration prosecutions between Jan. 20 and Oct. 31 compared with a year earlier.

A DOJ spokesperson told the Daily Beast that Attorney General Pam Bondi, 60, remained “acutely focused on eliminating transnational drug cartels and traffickers, prosecuting criminals, and safeguarding Americans from waste, fraud, and abuse.”

White House deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson told the Beast, “Any insinuation that the Trump administration isn’t successfully combatting dangerous crime or drug trafficking is false and uninformed.”

Trump’s opening-day executive order—titled “Protecting the American people against invasion”—directed Bondi and other senior officials to “prioritize” criminal cases tied to unlawful entry or ongoing unauthorized presence.

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The White House has since issued a flurry of executive actions aimed at delivering what Trump vowed would be the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, from declaring a border national emergency to blocking pathways to asylum.

More than a third of this year’s immigration surge has been funneled into magistrates’ courts, which handle lower-level offenses.

The FT found 2,507 magistrate-only cases since Jan. 20, a 10-fold increase from a year earlier and the highest level since 2008’s Operation Streamline under President George W. Bush.

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A YouGov/CBS News poll this month found 92 percent of Republicans back the administration’s deportation drive, compared with 15 percent of Democrats. But a slight majority—53 percent—believe ICE is being too tough during stops and detentions.

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Tom LatchemLead Global Correspondent

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