Aliens Convicted for Illegal Reentry — in Northern Ohio

On June 12, the U.S. Attorney’s Office (USAO) for the Northern District of Ohio issued a press release: “Six Illegal Aliens Sentenced, Four Others Indicted for Immigration Offenses”. As I recently explained, deportation isn’t the biggest threat looming over aliens living illegally in the United States: spending up to two years sharing a toilet and a shower with 19 other guys (or gals) in a federal prison pod is. Trump II is using that threat to the fullest.

Underutilized Tools

The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) is a veritable tool shed of authorities DHS immigration officers and federal prosecutors can use to keep would-be illegal migrants from coming illegally, remove those here unlawfully, and (as importantly and much more cheaply) strongly encourage those here without authorization to leave.

The problem is that most administrations in the past relied almost exclusively on the same suite of tools: arrest (under sections 236(a) and 287(a)(1) and (2) of the INA), detention (also section 236, plus sections 235(b)(1) and (b)(2)(A) of the INA), removal proceedings (section 240 of the INA), and deportation (section 241(a) of the INA).

Massive civil fines (section 274D of the INA) and criminal penalties (section 243(a)(1) of the INA) for willful failures to deport after being ordered removed were so rarely employed you’d have thought those provisions were written in Latin (or that the U.S. Treasury didn’t need the money), and even immigration experts were largely unaware of the registration requirements in sections 262 through 266 of the INA.

Of course, Congress wrote the latter when The Wizard of Oz was a first-run feature at the local Odeon.

Prosecutions for Illegal Entry and Reentry

Trump II, to one degree or another, has gone into the vault to dust off those powers, apply a little Naval Jelly to the rusty parts, and get them back into service.

But if you really want aliens to reconsider whether it’s worth it to come to this country or to keep living here illegally, nothing works like the threat of criminal prosecution for illegal entry (section 275 of the INA) or illegal reentry after formal deportation under section 276 of the INA.

Admittedly, a conviction for first-time illegal entry is little more than a warning shot: up to six months in jail (usually sentenced to time served awaiting prosecution) and a fine (rarely imposed).

But the heat increases for second or subsequent violations of section 275(a) of the INA: up to two years in federal prison, a felony sentence, and a story you won’t want to share when you go back home.

The real H-bomb — and the ultimate deterrent to treating the border like an unmanned toll booth with a bright red “Welcome” mat — however, is section 276 of the INA:

[A]ny alien who- (1) has been denied admission, excluded, deported, or removed or has departed the United States while an order of exclusion, deportation, or removal is outstanding, and thereafter (2) enters, attempts to enter, or is at any time found in, the United States ... shall be fined under title 18, or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both.

To be fair, the two-year penalty there is the same one that could be imposed for serial illegal reentry under section 275(a) of the INA, but if you reenter after deportation for certain crimes (section 276(b)(1) of the INA), it jumps to 10 years, and if your last deportation was due to an aggravated felony, it’s a potential sentence of 20 years under section 276(b)(2).

“Six Illegal Aliens Sentenced, Four Others Indicted for Immigration Offenses”

Which brings me to the USAO’s press release.

The six aliens in question include two Hondurans, two Mexicans, and a Guatemalan, each of whom was convicted of what the USAO describes as “illegal reentry”, plainly under section 276 of the INA because in each instance, the press release includes the alien’s last removal date. (The sixth was a Venezuelan convicted of Possession of Fraudulent Documents.)

Two of those aliens were deported way back in November 2010, while one was deported just over three years ago. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been since an alien was last removed, though — it only matters that the alien was sent home with a warning not to come back illegally, which the alien then ignored.

The sentences imposed in those cases aren’t much to write home about: from time served to four months. But a March press release from the USAO indicates they were arrested in mid-February, including the one who will be spending four more months receiving free food, housing, and health care, meaning they’ve had enough time to consider their life choices up to this point.

“Targeting All of the Insidious Results of the Four-Year Invasion of Illegal Immigration”

The USAO for the Northern District of Ohio is plainly proud of its work, because it’s been providing updates on these cases since the indictments were handed down, and consequently these prosecutions haven’t gone unnoticed in the local press.

That’s good, because other aliens in the same situation in the Buckeye State should be made aware of the potential price of flouting the immigration laws. Orange jumpsuits and $5 slides aren’t a good look on anybody.

That office is receiving its marching orders right from the top: Then-Deputy (now acting) Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a memo in early March calling on U.S. attorneys to “commit to investigations and prosecutions targeting all of the insidious results of the four-year invasion of illegal immigration that we are now working to repel”, and stressing sections 275 and 276, in particular.

The “Prosecuting Immigration Crimes Report”

It’s not just the USAO in the Northern District of Ohio that has gotten the message.

Quarterly, DOJ updates and publishes its “Prosecuting Immigration Crimes Report” (PICR), a collection of prosecutions various USAOs have filed for violations of sections 274 (alien smuggling and related crimes), 275, and 276 of the INA.

The latest one is current to the end of March (the end of the first half of FY 2026), and it reveals that DOJ has charged nearly 14,500 aliens with section 276 reentry after removal during that six-month period.

That includes almost 4,000 prosecutions by the USAO for the Southern District of Texas, 2,800-plus in the Western District of the Lone Star State, just short of 2,800 in Arizona, 1,342 in New Mexico, and about 1,150 in Southern California.

You can add 550 more in the three Florida federal districts; 110 in the three U.S. districts in Georgia; 88 in the Eastern, Western, and Northern Districts of DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s home state of Oklahoma; 75 in the three districts in Louisiana — and 40 in the Northern District of Ohio, rarely thought of as a hotbed of illegal entries.

At their current pace, USAOs nationwide will have filed approximately 29,000 charges for illegal reentry by the end of this fiscal year, September 30.

That would be 35 percent more than in FY 2024 (18,883), more than twice the prosecutions in FY 2023 (14,350), and 53 percent over and beyond the total in in FY 2022 (13,670).

Full-“Court” Press

Immigration-enforcement advocates are clamoring for a massive increase in street-level arrests of illegal migrants, which given the “the four-year invasion of illegal immigration” (in Blanche’s terms) that saw eight million-plus illegal migrants pour over a wildly insecure Southwest border, triggering “the insidious results” the then-DAG referred to, is a reasonable demand.

Regardless of the goal, however, any successful strategy is multifaceted and multilateral, and that’s as true when it comes to ensuring compliance with Congress’s mandates in the INA as it is in any other endeavor.

“Worksite investigations” under section 274A of the INA to ensure unauthorized aliens cannot work in the United States (and that sketchy U.S. employers can’t hire them) — the “briefcase enforcement” my boss Mark Krikorian frequently lauds — is one key front any “mass deportation” campaign, and DHS must expand them because if illegal immigrants can’t work here, they won’t stay.

Enforcing the staggering 274D fines for aliens under final orders (which the administration is expanding) is another front, and 287(g) programs, under which local and state law enforcement pitches in to help find and detain criminal aliens are a third.

A “full-court” immigration enforcement press, however, means using the authorities in sections 275 and 276 to prosecute alien scofflaws in literal federal courts and crowing about those prosecutions (“pour encourager les autres”, as Voltaire once recommended), which the USAO for the Northern District of Ohio and many other U.S. attorneys are now doing, with gusto.

And for those longing to get Border Patrol agents back into the interior fight, I’ve got good news: Agents from that component’s Sandusky Bay station, on the shores of Lake Erie, played a key role in those prosecutions, which CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott was quick to mention in this June 17 tweet:

The Heretofore Underutilized Immigration and Nationality Act

When I moved into my current house, I unexpectedly discovered the prior owners had left a garage room full of ladders, levels, saws, screws, hammers, nails, shop lamps, etc., most of which looked like they hadn’t seen the light of day since Reagan.

My wife (who’s handy) was thrilled.

When Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office — and “Border Czar” Tom Homan came back to DHS — they dove into the INA to use the long-ignored powers therein to deliver on the president’s immigration promises. Congress gave DHS and DOJ the tools they need to enforce the immigration laws it wrote. And finally, they are putting them to good use — including on the banks of the Great Lakes.