About 36% of all criminal cases filed in federal district courts in late 2009 and early 2010 involved immigration-related offenses, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts reported in March. Of 78,013 criminal cases filed in the twelve months ending September 30, 2010, 28,046 (35.9%) involved an immigration crime. This is an 8.7% increase from the prior year. Immigration-related offenses constitute the single largest category of federal crime lodged by prosecutors (drug offenses came in second with 15,785).
The leading immigration offense, improper reentry, was charged 23,149 times that year. Other immigration-related offenses lagged far behind: 2,177 charges of smuggling; 1,455 of fraud and misuse of a visa; 1,212 for improper entry; and 53 for “other immigration offenses.”
The Administrative
Office of the U.S. Courts is the agency that assists the federal courts in performing their judicial duties. These data comes from the AO’s full statistical compilation of the federal courts’ Judicial Business in FY 2010.
These data are consistent with a recent U.S. Sentencing Commission report stating that immigration offenses resulting in a sentence in 2009 are now the largest category of federal crime (32.2%)–the first in the Commission’s 20 years of data gathering for which this is true.
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