Subject: Re: Miller on deportations
And herein lies the rub: are you arguing that if law enforcement encounters someone who they know is on the deportation list they're supposed to ignore them because there's someone else out there to catch? Is there a provision in the law that says "This one's not enough of a criminal, go after the badder guy over there"?

If your answer is "prosecutorial outreach" I don't think that applies here.

You're thinking of "prosecutorial discretion," and of course it applies here.

I may have mentioned this before, but there's a reason why Inspector Javert is not the hero of Les Miserable. He's the antagonist. Because the show deals with the fact that someone can be an upright and virtuous person, even if they once did something that broke the law. The unthinking and uniform enforcement of the law in such circumstances doesn't yield justice - it only generates damage and pain well beyond any putative benefit.

This is why due process matters. We can formulate a general policy ("people here illegally should be deported"), but also recognize that in some individual cases the strict application of that policy will result in unfairness. We give people a chance to get in front of another person to plead their case. We also deliberately choose which instances of lawbreaking to prioritize for enforcement.

Prosecutorial discretion is the principle that if you have limited prosecutorial resources, you should concentrate them on the cases where you do the most good and the least harm. Which means that you try to locate, apprehend, process, and deport the people who pose a genuine danger to the community - and allocate your resources to those cases. You don't deliberately send your resources to the local ICE office to round up the harmless grandmother or housewife with an infant child who are dutifully reporting to her regularly-scheduled check-in, just because you can get your numbers up more easily that way.