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chapter three The Rules and Exceptions of Border Justice when judge reynaldo garza replaced the late Judge Allred in the Southern District of Texas, he became one of only four federal district judges responsible for trying federal civil and criminal cases in the six court divisions.1 Judge Garza principally held court in Brownsville, his hometown on the U.S.Mexican border, but he periodically trekked north 150 miles, to preside over cases in Corpus Christi. Similarly, Judge Ben Connally shuttled between his home in Houston and the border court at Laredo, with stops at the courthouse in Victoria in between. Judge James Noel tried cases both in Houston and Galveston. The number of court divisions exceeded the number of judges until 1966, when Judges Woodrow Seals and John Singleton joined the court. Seals thereafter shared some of the caseload in Corpus Christi, but Singleton primarily held court in Houston. As chief judge after 1962, Connally might have assigned one or more of the new judges to Laredo. Instead, he retained his responsibility for that border court. Perhaps the chief enjoyed the variety, because the typical cases in the border divisions were quite different from those that filled the dockets farther north. It is also likely that Judge Connally kept the duty because that allowed him to hunt on the weekends he was in south Texas.2 Brownsville, Laredo, and numerous smaller points of entry on the border were major conduits for U.S. trade with Mexico. Private commercial controversies, including admiralty and labor cases, did appear in the border courts. Because the Laredo and Brownsville court divisions served the mostly agricultural Lower Rio Grande Valley, however, the number of private disputes arising in the two border divisions was negligible compared to the large number of civil suits docketed in the commercial, industrial, and maritime boomtowns like Houston, Corpus Christi, and Galveston. That did not mean that the border courts were judicial backwaters. They were in fact the Southern District’s laboratories of criminal case management . The valley did not share equally in the benefits of the state’s growth, but south Texas always was at the center of a booming illicit economy.3 93 94 chapter three The U.S. attorney’s office prosecuted more of the Southern District’s criminal cases in either Laredo or Brownsville than in any of the much larger divisions in Houston, Galveston, and Corpus Christi.4 In 1964, for example, when the government prosecuted 1,150 cases in the Southern District, it filed 255 of those in Laredo (22.2 percent of the total). The same year, by contrast, the government filed only 41 criminal cases in Corpus Christi (3.5 percent). In 1965 the government filed 280 criminal cases, out of the annual total of 1,156, in Laredo (24.2 percent ). Since federal attorneys prosecuted a comparable number of cases every year in Brownsville, the border divisions collectively processed nearly half of the district ’s criminal cases. When the number of prosecutions rose in subsequent years, the disproportion in the criminal caseloads grew as well, until, by the end of the decade, the border divisions accounted for almost 90 percent of the Southern District ’s total criminal caseload. Of the 1,913 criminal cases they filed in 1969, federal prosecutors brought 819 in Laredo (42.8 percent), and 858 in Brownsville (44.85 percent).5 The U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of Texas prosecuted the variety of federal crimes that might also occur in other judicial districts,6 and, as a result, Garza and Connally tried border defendants under various federal statutes covering, for example, vehicle theft7 or securities fraud.8 But Texas always attracted would-be immigrants and smugglers, who were not deterred by the often slow and shallow Rio Grande, which separated the state from Mexico. Trials for alleged violations of federal immigration or customs laws consistently dominated dockets. Prosecutions of these categories of crime, moreover, rose to unprecedented levels during the 1960s. The demand for cheap, unskilled labor usually outstripped the number of workers available through government-sponsored plans like the bracero program. The ready availability of work, even difficult, dangerous, and low-paid work, ensured that undocumented aliens regularly attempted to cross the border from Mexico. The sustained effort to arrest and to prosecute these immigrants is a relatively recent development. And after Congress halted the flow of the braceros, undocumented entry into the United States dramatically increased.9...

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