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In the last three months, about half of the 3,400 people in Tucson who went through the fast-track prosecution program, known as Operation Streamline, were first-time crossers, court calendars show.
The new crackdown on first-time crossers contributed to a 35 percent jump in immigration prosecutions at federal courts in Arizona from May to June, according to U.S. Department of Justice data gathered by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
However, the 1,700 immigration prosecutions in June still lagged prosecutions from June 2016 by 4 percent. Since 2012, those prosecutions in Arizona have fallen 54 percent, clearinghouse data show.
Civil immigration cases often last several years. Nationwide, pending cases have been active for an average of 672 days. The immigration court system faces a backlog of 600,000 cases, which is a major obstacle to the Trump administration's goal of increasing deportations.
As of June, the 679 pending cases in Tucson's federal immigration court, which handles cases of people not being detained by law enforcement, had been on the docket for an average of 573 days, according to Syracuse's records clearinghouse.
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