US Attorney for Austin not prosecuting most felony illegal reentry cases

Austin American-Statesman:

In the 10 full months since Robert Pitman took over as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, the number of immigrants prosecuted for illegal re-entry of a deported alien in Austin has dropped 46 percent compared with the same time frame a year earlier, according to an American-Statesman analysis of federal court data.

The decrease in the number of immigrants charged with the felony crime began two years ago but has accelerated under Pitman, who was sworn in Oct. 3 as the top federal prosecutor in the district that includes Austin.

Pitman said the drop in illegal re-entry prosecutions followed the loss of funding for an assistant U.S. attorney who had been designated to work solely on immigration cases. He noted that those identified as being in the country illegally but not prosecuted for illegal re-entry are still being deported and are among the record numbers of undocumented immigrants in Austin and other areas of Central and South Texas who have been deported this year.

An Obama administration policy encourages law enforcement officers to focus on immigrants who pose a threat to national security or public safety.

“We have been concentrating in the Austin division on identifying individuals who have serious criminal histories and prioritizing them for prosecution,” Pitman said in an interview.

Republican U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, who is from Austin and is a former federal prosecutor, said in a statement that he believes federal prosecutors must prioritize whom they charge. “It is Washington’s responsibility to secure our borders and enforce our immigration laws, and this administration has yet to make a 100 percent effort to do that,” he said.

Certain illegal re-entry charges have created controversy in Austin’s federal courts.

In 2010, U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks told prosecutors that it was a waste of taxpayer money to prosecute immigrants for re-entering the country after a previous deportation if they had little previous criminal history.

When Pitman, a former federal magistrate judge, was appointed U.S. attorney, Sparks told the American-Statesman that he hoped Pitman would use his discretion to limit illegal re-entry prosecutions, something that prosecutors had done until about five years ago.
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I think Sparks and Pitman are both wrong.  Their misplaced empathy for those who come here illegally only encourages people to keep breaking the law and does nothing to deter illegal entry which is the purpose of the statute.  New York City got control of crime with what was called the "broken window" theory.  They prosecuted people for crimes large and small and all of a sudden crime started to drop.  The same thing would happen with illegals if we would just enforce the law rather than look at these people as future Democrat voters.

What we have is an administration that is more interested in recruiting future Democrats than the rule of law.