AZ has 2% of population, 19% of fed prosecutions: four out of five are related to violations of federal immigration laws
PHOENIX - Nearly one in every five cases being brought by federal prosecutors nationwide are filed in Arizona, according to a new report.
The Transactional Research Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University found there were 20,818 prosecutions here in the first eight months of the current fiscal year, out of 109,532 for the entire country.
By contrast, Arizona represents just 2 percent of the national population.
More than four out of every five Arizona prosecutions are related to violations of federal immigration laws - a category of prosecution that is showing an upward trend.
Five years ago, U.S. attorney’s offices brought fewer than 3,200 immigration cases to the courts in the first eight months; so far this year the number is more than 17,500.
Drug prosecutors also are up.
None of this impressed Gov. Jan Brewer, who has been engaged in a war of words with the Obama administration about what she said is the failure of the government to secure the border.
“These efforts to arrest and prosecute are good, but they are not enough,” said gubernatorial press aide Paul Senseman, who interpreted the statistics as showing things are getting worse, not better.
“The data suggests that the border-security problem is acute in Arizona and growing quite rapidly,” Senseman continued.
But Dennis Burke, the U.S. attorney for Arizona, said the prosecution statistics do not represent more crime.
He said his predecessors wanted to pursue more cases but lacked the money to hire more lawyers to bring more cases to court.
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