THE BORDER REPORT

The Associated Press has published what may be one of the most egregious errors about the U.S.-Mexico border I've seen to date and that's a shame. In a story that's been moved more than 18,000 times since last Saturday, The AP used the numbers provided by the Feds to prove that prosecutions of illegal immigrants rarely happen. The premise is correct; the U.S. Attorney's Office rarely prosecutes illegal border crossers unless the number of attempts get out of hand. With border prosecution offices already taking on large numbers of caseloads; I wouldn't expect that to change any time soon. But the numbers used to derive that point are grossly over-inflated; in short, The AP made the same mistake most news organizations make, mistaking apprehension events for people (ten border crossers captured ten times equals 100 apprehensions not 100 people). "Ninety-eight percent of those arrested between Oct. 1, 2000, and Sept. 30, 2005, were never prosecuted for illegally entering the country, according to an Associated Press analysis of federal data. Those 5.2 million immigrants were simply escorted back across the Rio Grande and turned loose. Many presumably tried to slip into the U.S. again," the story states. The number of illegal immigrants prosecuted in fiscal 2005 was 30,848, the story states, and that's probably true, but there certainly weren't 1.17 million people arrested that year which it also states. It's an important point that merits attention every time I see it because apprehension numbers give such a misconception about what happens on the border every day. And it's one not helped by the Homeland Security Department who repeatedly turns down requests for the actual numbers of people who were arrested. They have the actual numbers too; every border crosser is run through the FBI's database, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, and I'm told that Customs and Border Protection in Washington is keeping track. But The AP is not Homeland; it's a news organization. They should be aware that the numbers cited by apprehensions distort what the American public should know about this place. The misinformation has been going on so long, I wonder if the Homeland Security Department doesn't benefit from the inflated numbers. According to this little gem, the FBI is currently upgrading the IAFIS system to do more than check police jackets and fingerprints and include all the biometric data it can draw, including DNA. The information gathering process is getting better and better but the dissemination is getting worse and worse. So who's benefitting from that? Certainly not the taxpayers.