| No Images? Click here   President Donald Trump did something he probably didn't intend to do when he separated migrant families last year: He launched a conversation over whether crossing the border without authorization should be a crime. Now that has become a major issue in the Democratic primary, in part thanks to reporting by HuffPost's Roque Planas. We talked to him about his recent piece on backlash from some Democrats and much more. How did you get interested in writing about decriminalization of unauthorized border crossing? I’ve been going out to see the mass hearings for immigration prosecutions in Tucson since around 2012. A bunch of folks -- mostly men, virtually always Latin Americans of color -- line up in front of the judge, shackled at the wrists and ankles. And then the whole process, from initial hearing to pleading and sentencing, gets disposed, rapid-fire, in about two hours for up to 70 people. It’s only after they serve their prison sentences that they go through their deportation proceedings. Immigrant rights groups and legal groups were furious about it, contending that the procedure overcriminalized Hispanics, that it was redundant, that it violated due process, that it was driving mass incarceration at the federal level. Around the summer of 2016, it became a priority for me. I was reading through Bureau of Justice Statistics reports and found these contradictory racial stats. It became clear that around 80 percent of people convicted of federal crimes were actually people of color, thanks to these illegal entry and reentry prosecutions. That left Obama with the legacy of having locked up more people of color on federal criminal charges than any president in modern U.S. history. Once Trump won, the question became: What he would do with this massive incarceration machine, designed specifically for migrants, that Obama had just handed him? One of your recent pieces looked at the backlash from some Democrats to the idea of decriminalizing migration. Is that something you were surprised by? Yes. I hadn’t really anticipated that former Obama folks would lead the charge on this against a majority of the 2020 field and a broad swath of the immigrant rights and criminal justice reform groups. But now that it’s happened, I can see the logic. They belonged to the administration that presided over the Democrats’ loss to Trump, largely because of the hostility over immigration that has driven some elements of the Republican base for the last few years. And at the end of the day, Trump can only take advantage of this massive criminal immigration enforcement system because Obama scaled it up and gave it to him. So I suspect there’s a touch of defensiveness about Obama’s legacy there. And when you take the bird's-eye view, Obama officials who worked on immigration always had a tense relationship with the more progressive groups that would push a big reform like this -- partly because the most progressive activists gave up on pressuring the GOP and focused more on wrenching concessions from Democrats, leaving some of those folks feeling like they took a load of shit even though they felt like they were on the right side of history. Establishment Dems viewed Republican intransigence as the barrier to reform and hyper-enforcement of immigration as the price they had to pay to get it. Now, with a competitive primary driven by progressive enthusiasm, candidates are questioning that logic, not least because Trump has given all immigration enforcement a bad name, even though he’s in a lot of ways much less efficient than Obama. I could see how those trends would make an establishment still smarting from Trump’s unexpected victory very nervous. What were some of the challenges of reporting that piece? It has been hard to get people who defend this system to speak to me on the record, which is frustrating because, to my mind, the burden lies on them to explain why we need it. The only consistent argument we’ve heard from Homeland Security about this is that these prosecutions serve as a deterrent, but they’ve never been able to provide convincing evidence for that. So the machine rolls along, plowing through a lot of low-level offenders in the process who are small potatoes in the grand scheme of federal law enforcement. It’s very similar to the drug war, in the sense that once you create the system, you have tons of embedded interests there that make it hard to roll back. There’s also a subtext here that critics think decriminalizing border-crossing violations is bad politics because it sounds too much like "open borders." But it isn’t open borders. We have a massive and largely unpopular civil immigration system that’s doing the bulk of the enforcing, including all the border arrests and 100 percent of the deportations. The question posed by reformers is not whether we should get rid of immigration law, it’s whether all these duplicative efforts make sense for our enforcement goals. So it would be nice if folks could separate the policy from the politics, and argue accordingly. What do you hope readers will take away from your reporting on this topic? Since the 1990s, the American default approach toward immigration is to pile more and more money into enforcement. I would like to help people understand, at a minimum, the costs and trade-offs we have to pay in order to make that happen. One element of that is the dollars involved. When we hear about politicians vilifying immigrants as "job stealers," one has to ask whether the average working Joe would rather the federal government fork out some where up in the ballpark of $1 billion a year to lock up folks who are on their way to deportation proceedings regardless, or whether they’d like to see that money put into job training or health care or their kid’s education. And then there’s the cost to priorities: Immigration prosecutions overtook half the federal criminal docket in 2008. We now widely recognize that the financial crisis was driven by rampant fraud across the financial sector. About 9 million Americans lost their homes in the aftermath of that crisis, but what did the Justice Department do? It prosecuted hundreds of thousands of migrants for an infraction that the civil system would deal with, even if DOJ did nothing. So there’s a clear opportunity cost to this myopic focus on immigration.
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