US

Obama Admin Slows Immigration Prosecutions, Increases Weapons Charges

REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

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The number of new federal criminal prosecutions have hit their lowest level in nearly a decade, helped by declines in white collar and immigration prosecutions.

That’s according to Justice Department data recently analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.

As TRAC details, the 9,118 federal criminal prosecutions the government undertook in July are the fewest since July 2007. The July 2016 tally represented a 15.5 percent decline from June and continued this fiscal year’s ongoing downward trend.

During the the first ten months of this fiscal year — which began in October 2015 — the Justice Department reported 112,942 new criminal prosecutions, on pace to reach about 135,530 for the entirety of this fiscal year. If the rate of prosecutions remains consistent, this fiscal year will yield four percent fewer federal criminal prosecutions compared to FY 2015, according to TRAC’s report.

Notably, a decline in the number of white collar and immigration prosecutions has contributed to the lower level of federal criminal prosecutions. So far this fiscal year, federal prosecutions of so-called white collar crime dropped 11 percent compared to last fiscal year. Immigration prosecutions, too, dropped 4.1 percent compared to the previous year.

By contrast, the number of federal weapons prosecutions increased 8.7 percent and the number of drug prosecutions rose 0.8 percent compared to the year prior.

While “Immigration” prosecutions are on the decline, they represent the largest share of Justice Department prosecutions, accounting for 52 percent of cases classified by prosecutors in July, according to TRAC. The second largest category of prosecutions were “Drugs/Narcotics” representing 16.4 percent of federal prosecutions. The remainder — which prosecutors categorized as “Other” — included “Weapons,” which represented 5.5 percent of prosecutions; and “White Collar Crime,” making up 4.6 percent of prosecutions.

The top three lead charges the federal government prosecuted during the first ten months of this fiscal year were “Entry of alien at improper time or place; etc.,” followed by “Reentry of deported alien,” and third “Drug Abuse Prevention & Control-Prohibited acts A.”

Although the number of federal criminal prosecutions this fiscal year to-date is down compared to any of the past eight years, it is higher than the level of federal criminal prosecutions initiated from 1996 through 2007.

“Compared to five years ago when there were 162,997, the estimate of FY 2016 prosecutions of this type is down 16.9 percent,” TRAC reports. “Prosecutions over the past year are still higher than they were ten years ago. Overall, the data show that prosecutions of this type are up 16.1 percent from the level of 116,739 reported in 2006 and up 92 percent from the level of 70,587 reported in 1996.”