Underage cartel recruits increasingly prosecuted by local courts

Instead of being tried in a federal court, juvenile smugglers along the U.S.– Mexico border are increasingly being prosecutedin local courts in a new trend.

In the past when Border Patrol or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents would catch teenagers smuggling narcotics, the agency would hand the case over to federal prosecutors, but Border Patrol has entered into a new arrangement with local prosecutors and the U.S. Attorney General’s office to send cases directly to local courts for prosecution.

Drug cartels and smugglers have increasingly turned to underage recruits to help them transport drugs, and to combat this growing trend federal authorities have turned to local courts like Santa Cruz County in Arizona as it is better equipped to handle young offenders than the federal government.

Kevin Kelly, the assistant special agent in charge of ICE Homeland Security Investigations in Nogales, Arizona, said sending juvenile offenders through the local legal system provides them a great opportunity to be rehabilitated.

“They’re basically pushed in and pushed out of the federal system,” Kelly said. “The penalty is stiffer from the county, but, on the back end, the rehabilitation and the diversion, and the long-term assistance that the (juvenile) offender gets is better.”

“If they are juveniles that are living in our county and going to our schools, then those are the juveniles that we want to try to help,” added Liliana Ortega, chief deputy Santa Cruz County attorney for criminal cases.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office is also hopeful that the new arrangement with Santa Cruz County will help stem the increasing number of juvenile drug smugglers.

“The (Santa Cruz County Attorney’s Office) and the resources of the local juvenile authorities will hopefully have more impact than a federal prosecution in discouraging this behavior,” said Sandy Raynor, a public affairs officer for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona.

In contrast Saji Vettiyil, an Arizona lawyer who has represented juvenile defendants in state and federal courts, argued that underage drug smugglers actually receive better treatment in the federal court system.

Vettiyil acknowledged that the federal court system did not have its own juvenile rehabilitation program, but was careful to note that federal authorities often contract state and local agencies to provide that service.

In addition, federal prosecutors are often much more generous in waiving or reducing the costs of these services for convicted offenders.

“In Santa Cruz County, most of the kids who commit these offenses, they and their families are already destitute,” Vettiyil said. “Now they are adding more misery by forcing them to pay for these services which they could have received for free, or close to free.”

Vettiyil is also concerned that at the local level prosecutors will mete out harsher punishments as they can pursue adult felony convictions in juvenile drug cases and push for incarceration, which in federal courts is rarely used and requires more judicial review.

“In the federal court system, a juvenile, regardless of the crime, is presumed to be able to be rehabilitated. You are only allowed to place a juvenile in a confined setting if it can be justified for therapeutic reasons - and a deterrent effect is not a therapeutic reason in the federal system,” Vettiyil said. “Juveniles are treated as juveniles in the federal system because there’s a presumption that they can be rehabilitated.”