Putting TRAC to Work
  Legal and Scholarly
Law & Social Inquiry, Cambridge University Press
July 9, 2020

Liberal Policies, Punitive Effects: The Politics of Enforcement Discretion on the US-Mexico Border
By Patrisia Macías-Rojas


In the late 1990s, following the Clinton administration’s high-profile border patrol operations and the passage of the IIRIRA in 1996, southern Arizona became the busiest crossing point along the US-Mexico border. Under the Obama administration, Arizona’s federal courts led the country in criminal prosecutions, with immigration accounting for 85 percent of the caseload in 2010. By 2011, reentry after deportation had become the leading charge sending people to prison, at 47 percent of all criminal prosecutions (Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse 2011; Light, Lopez, and Gonzales-Barrera 2014). The US Border Patrol was the lead agency referring a majority of all cases to the US Attorney’s Office (USAO) for criminal prosecution (Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse 2010).


Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, Syracuse University
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