3,121 desperate journeysExposing a week of chaos under Trump's zero tolerance

They came to the US seeking a better life. They ended up behind bars. Thousands of documents analyzed by the Guardian provide the most comprehensive picture yet of what happened to immigrants prosecuted under the Trump administration's zero tolerance policy-Leer este artículo en español

Olivia Solon, Julia Carrie Wong, Pamela Duncan, Margaret Katcher, Patrick Timmons, and Sam Morris

On 6 April 2018, the US attorney general, Jeff Sessions, issued a memoto federal prosecutors along the US-Mexico border directing them “to adopt immediately a zero-tolerance policy” for violations of a federal law barring “improper entry” into the country. “You are on the front lines of this battle,” Sessions wrote, as if rallying his troops against an invading army.

Over the next six weeks, the collateral damage of the Trump administration’s policy was revealed: some 2,654 children were taken from their parents or guardians in order to fulfill the mandate that they be prosecuted for a criminal misdemeanor. As of 27 September, 219 children whose parents had already been deported remained in government custody.

Zero tolerance pushed serious fraud, drugs and weapons trafficking offences out of the courtroom to make way for the flood of people whose only crime was crossing the border. Between March and June, federal prosecutions referred by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in the five districts along the south-west border rose by 74%, from 6,368 to 11,086.

I don’t think this is really about justice anymoreCesar Pierce, defense attorney

Today the Guardian publishes analysis of documents from more than 3,500 criminal cases filed by border district federal prosecutors during a single week of the zero tolerance policy: 13-19 May.
The three-month investigation, the most comprehensive analysis to date of the experiences of thousands of migrants entering the US during that period, shows how:

• Zero tolerance churned thousands of migrants through an assembly-line justice system with copy-and-paste criminal complaints converted to hastily accepted guilty pleas.
• Just 12.8% of the criminal cases filed by federal prosecutors were the kind of serious crimes – corruption, fraud and trafficking – that citizens expect federal prosecutors to pursue.
• Sentence lengths for migrants charged with the same crimes varied dramatically depending on the state where they were arrested.

The court documents shine a spotlight on the migrants’ perilous journeys and the extreme lengths immigration enforcement goes to intercept them. They also reveal the lack of documentation created when children were torn away from families at the point of arrest – a shocking omission.

Four months after thousands were charged, only 23 individuals continue to fight their cases. The overwhelming majority have pleaded guilty, and only one case has actually gone to trial, where the defendant was found guilty.

“I don’t think this is really about justice anymore,” said Cesar Pierce, a defense attorney in Las Cruces, New Mexico, who represented 18 of the individuals in our sample.

“Justice really factors very little into it.”

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