The paradigmatic federal criminal case is not the prosecution of Elizabeth Holmes or John Gotti, but rather that of a poor immigrant of color for a lowlevel border offense. There persists a perception that federal criminal court is reserved for complex crimes that require robust resources to prosecute and defend. These resources are said to fund procedural rigor and afford a dignity to the proceedings that state courts cannot match. If this mythologized federal criminal court ever existed, it no longer does. Immigration cases overwhelm the federal criminal docket, making up more than half of all filed cases. The majority of those recently prosecuted in federal court are noncitizens, most of whom are Latinx. The changed composition of the docket has a profound impact on the operation of the federal criminal courts. Those charged with federal immigration crimes are canaries in the proverbial coal mine, and federal immigration prosecutions are an underexamined driver of the racialized phenomenon of mass incarceration.

This Article argues that immigration cases have remade federal criminal procedure to the detriment of citizen and noncitizen defendants alike. “Operation Streamline” prosecutions, where dozens charged with misdemeanor immigration crimes are counseled, plead guilty, and sentenced in mass proceedings, are now a frequent feature of federal criminal practice. The expedited procedures refined in Streamline migrated from the low-level immigration cases for which they were designed and now feature in gang and drug trafficking cases far from the Southern border. A right that is diminished due to the executive’s plenary power over immigration and the border is a right that remains diminished for us all. For example, Fourth Amendment jurisprudence developed in the realm of immigration cases offers us little protection near the border, regardless of citizenship status. This Article documents these trends and argues that, collectively, they debase the federal criminal courts and erode constitutional and procedural norms in a way that harms us all. Finally, it advocates for substantive changes to immigration law and policy to begin to reverse these troubling trends.

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