California federal courts are set to start holding group immigration trials this week, kicking off a strategy already adopted by other states on the border for some years. California decided to start using the process after the number of prosecutions ballooned during the last few months, due to the zero-tolerance policy adopted by the Trump administration caused resources to become stretched, according to the Associated Press (AP).
Group trials, which critics have labeled assembly-line justice, started in late 2005 when Operation Streamline was introduced by Border Patrol in Del Rio, Texas, to prosecute anyone illegally crossing the border. The practice has spread to all federal courts in most states on the border, except California, over the past 13 years, with the most populous state in the nation arguing that resources were better spent by targeting repeat criminal immigrant border crossers and smuggling networks.
But, in June, the number of cases of illegal entry in the Southern District of California jumped to more than 800 from four in March, the AP says. Even this is mild compared to the 9,500 cases that the four border area courts in the Southern District of Texas handled in the eight weeks following the implementation of zero-tolerance.
Mass hearings enable courts to deal with several cases at the same time, enabling working hours to stay in a reasonable range and ease up jail time, with groups able to include as little as five or as many as 70 individuals.