MELISSA BLOCK, host:
The border near Tucson, Arizona, is one of the nation's busiest. Last year, nearly 400,000 illegal immigrants crossed into the U.S. there. The federal government has begun prosecuting more of those illegal immigrants.
As NPR's Ted Robbins reports, that effort is likely to strain all parts of the legal system.
TED ROBBINS: This is the processing center of the Border Patrol's Tucson station, an eight-sided cinderblock room. Groups of men, women and children caught crossing the border illegally sit in cells along the walls. One by one, they step up to a curved counter manned by Border Patrol agents. The agents take their fingerprints and pictures and enter their personal information into a computer.
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ROBBINS: In the Tucson sector, this scene is repeated anywhere from 500 to 1500 times a day. So often that the vast majority of crossers are just put on a bus and driven back to the border to try again or go home. But now, some first-time crossers with no criminal record are being prosecuted.
Mr. ROBERT BOATRIGHT (Chief Deputy Patrol Agent, U.S. Border Patrol, Tucson Sector): It's a deterrent.
ROBBINS: The Border Patrol's deputy sector chief, Robert Boatright, says the purpose of the increased prosecutions is not to punish crossers. It's to get them to stop trying.
Mr. BOATRIGHT: Yeah. Word of mouth spreads very quickly in a border environment. One merely has to mention prosecution initiatives and the average border-crosser and, certainly, the smugglers learn about that very quickly.
ROBBINS: But it's going to be a very expensive and difficult proposition.
Deputy Chief U.S. Marshal Raymond Kondo and his staff have to transport, feed and house every arrested border crosser.
Mr. RAY KONDO (Deputy Chief U.S. Marshal, Tucson): Our biggest problem is not so much the financial aspect but the physical aspect as far as running out of bed space for prisoners.
ROBBINS: So to start, the Border Patrol is prosecuting just 42 additional people every day. But each defendant needs a judge, a prosecutor and a defense attorney. What happens when this plan, the count goes up to 60 or even 80 a day? The head of the Federal Public Defender's office in Tucson, Heather Williams, says clients can forget about adequate representation.
Ms. HEATHER WILLIAMS (Assistant Federal Public Defender, Tucson, Arizona): I don't think that it can be effective at all. I don't think that you have enough time, first of all, to explain to that number of people their constitutional rights and what a plea agreement is and giving up a right to trial and believe that you know that all 80 of those people really understand what they're giving up.
ROBBINS: They face two weeks to six months in prison, and likely, their future right to immigrate legally. Williams believes the stepped-up prosecutions will not deter many people. By and large, she says, people who cross illegally do so out of desperation.
But the Border Patrol's Robert Boatright says getting the word out that there's even a chance of arrest before the killing desert's heat sets in.
Mr. BOATRIGHT: If we can create that deterrent now early in the year and reduce those numbers of cross-border interdictions as well as, you know, mitigating even one death, we can make some benefit here.
ROBBINS: Stepped-up prosecutions have cut the number of people crossing in Texas and cut border violence in Yuma. But those places have less than one-tenth the crossings in the Tucson sector. Making a dent here could take more time and more prosecutions than 42 or 142 a day.
Ted Robbins, NPR News, Tucson.