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Just as immigration law became increasingly indistinguishable from criminal law, the former has suffered from similarly weak due-process protections as the latter, as harsh potential sentences were used to coerce defendants into guilty pleas. The court system was converted into a massive, prosecutor-directed assembly line to prison and deportation. As of 2016, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, more than half of all federal prosecutions were for these two migration crimes of entry and re-entry.
It’s still too early to measure the full scope of Trump’s policies, because data for illegal entry and reentry charges is not yet available for May or June. But prosecutions have been on the rise over Trump’s time in office, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. In April, the number of prosecutions for illegal entry stood at 4,521, up from 2,080 in January 2017.
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