'OPERATION STREAMLINE' Feds Force Immigrants Into Parking Garage for 'Assembly-Line Justice'
Attorneys say they had no privacy with clients, some of whom were coerced into pleading guilty before talking to a lawyer.
JASON MCGAHAN
07.13.18 5:13 AM ET
SAN DIEGO—The question from a U.S. magistrate judge to a young woman from Mexico was simple: Are you a United States citizen? But the woman paused and a titter went up from the packed gallery of court officials and news reporters.
“Ms. Gil-Gonzalez, are you an American citizen?” Judge Jill Burkhardt repeated, and the court interpreter simultaneously translated into Spanish. Marcionila Gil-Gonzalez, 19, bit her lip and looked bewildered.
The problem, said her court-appointed attorney, Kathryn Thickstun, was that her client's Spanish is limited to what she picked up in school. Her native language is mixtec, an indigenous dialect native to Mexico. Gil-Gonzalez, her lawyer said, didn’t understand what she was being asked.
Gil-Gonzalez was one of 41 immigrants charged with entering the U.S. illegally, tried in a group as part of “Operation Streamline.” It’s a Justice Department initiative to fast-track prosecutions of cases like hers. San Diego hadn’t participated until its caseload ballooned after Attorney General Jeff Sessions told prosecutors to use “zero tolerance” against anyone crossing the southern border of the country illegally.
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