Texas Struggles to Prosecute Migrants Under Law-and-Order Approach - Crime Report
Facing crowded jails, a lack of defense lawyers, a shortage of judges, and accusations that a Texas county official has supplanted judges who failed to rule in line with their law enforcement-heavy response to an “invasion of illegal aliens,” the two small rural counties of Kinney and Val Verde have become overwhelmed by cases after authorizing state and local police departments to partner with the owners of borderland ranches and use trespassing laws to arrest migrants who cross their land, reports the New York Times. More than 2,500 migrants have been arrested on trespassing charges, all of them men, with roughly 900 still being held in state prisons. The two counties are the only ones out of the state’s 32 border counties to adopt the approach created in 2021 by Gov. Greg Abbott.
Defense lawyers have filed on behalf of more than 400 migrants arguing that the arrests violated the U.S. Constitution because only the federal government has jurisdiction over immigration law. In Val Verde, some prosecutors have been forced to release the men after holding them for months because they had not filed charges while others began dismissing or declining to prosecute most of the trespassing cases involving thousands of Haitian migrants. However, Kinney County has embraced the state-run law-and-order approach to the sharp rise in migrants coming from Mexico, going so far as to remove three judges who, in many instances, 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 of the migrants have opted to plead guilty or no contest to the trespassing charges in exchange for an immediate release offered by prosecutors.
source: https://thecrimereport.org/2022/01/27/texas-struggles-to-prosecute-migrants-under-law-and-order-approach/
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