Cases dismissed, judges replaced: Courts struggle to prosecute migrants
HOUSTON — When Texas authorities began charging migrants who crossed into the state from Mexico with trespassing last year, officials quickly encountered a problem: The two small rural counties tasked with prosecuting the cases became overwhelmed.
Among the many issues, there were not enough judges, particularly in Kinney County, a border community about 120 miles west of San Antonio where the state’s effort has been most aggressively enforced. Three retired judges were brought in by the state to help, starting in the late summer.
Then, last month, the county attorney accused the judges of impropriety. The next day, all three were replaced with others handpicked by the top county official, Judge Tully Shahan.
The shake-up surprised the judges and outraged attorneys for the migrants, hundreds of whom remain jailed and awaiting prosecution. Immigration advocates accused Judge Shahan of supplanting judges who did not rule as he wanted.
The program, created last year by Gov. Greg Abbott and known as Operation Lone Star, authorized state and local police departments to partner with the owners of borderland ranches and use trespassing laws to arrest migrants who cross their land. Just two of the state’s 32 border counties — Kinney and its neighbor to the west, Val Verde — have adopted the approach.
More than 2,500 migrants have been arrested on trespassing charges, all of them men. (Under the Texas program, women and children found on private land are handed directly to immigration officials.) About 900 are still being held in state prisons.
The misdemeanor trespassing arrests, contentious from the start, have come under increased scrutiny in recent weeks.
This month, a state court judge dismissed the case of a migrant arrested on trespassing charges in Kinney County after his attorneys argued that the arrest violated the U.S. Constitution because only the federal government has jurisdiction over immigration law. The county has appealed.
Defense attorneys filed similar arguments the next day on behalf of more than 400 other migrants. In some cases, prosecutors have been forced to release the men after holding them for months because they had not filed charges.
In nearby Val Verde County, which has about 47,500 residents and includes Del Rio, where thousands of Haitian migrants huddled under a bridge last fall, the county attorney began dismissing or declining to prosecute most of the trespassing cases. The county has since seen a sharp drop in the number of migrants arrested.
By contrast, officials in Kinney County, where about 3,100 people live in and around one central small town and on vast ranches, have embraced the state-run law-and-order approach to the sharp rise in migrants coming from Mexico, an increase that last year reached levels not seen in two decades.
But the three judges who were brought in to assist in hearing hundreds of cases did not always rule in ways that county officials wanted. In many instances, they agreed to release migrants who had been held for months without a hearing, pending a court date. Their replacements have so far denied all requests for such a pretrial release.
As a result, many migrants have pleaded guilty or no contest to trespassing charges in exchange for immediate release offered by prosecutors.
“The goal of Operation Lone Star,” said Anita Gupta, staff lawyer at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, “is to criminalize migrants and then transfer them to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for enforcement and deportation.”