Four law enforcement associations are warning that some of the compromises agreed to in the Senate’s revised criminal justice reform bill could be “favorable from a drug cartel’s perspective.”
“Indeed, provisions that were viewed as favorable from a law enforcement perspective have now been removed, and provisions that could be viewed as favorable from a drug cartel’s perspective have been added,” the heads of four law enforcement and anti-drug trafficking groups wrote in an April 11 letter to senators obtained by the Washington Examiner.
An unusual coalition of senators, including liberal Democrats and Tea Party Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, have been working to revise the bill in ways that would attract law-and-order Republicans. But they have only had partial success, and criticism of the drug provisions suggests that immigration hawks will maintain their opposition to the bill.
“[I]nexplicably, the bill now adds leniency for those who smuggle drugs into the United States by boats and submarines,” National Association of Assistant United States Attorneys president Steve Cook, Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association president Nate Catura, Law Enforcement Action Network president Ron Hosko, and National Narcotics Officers’ Associations’ Coalition president Robert Bushman wrote in the letter.
The provision is included in a “safety valve” section of the bill that most senators involved in the deliberations regard as non-controversial. In the revised agreement, the negotiators decided to give maritime drug traffickers the benefit of sentencing reforms provided to low-level drug dealers convicted of other non-violent offenses.
Senate GOP opponents are calling it “Scarface” provision, and are calling on Attorney General Loretta Lynch to make the case against the agreement.
“Certainly, the Mexican border is a major transshipment point for heroin and cocaine, which is a shift from 20 years ago,” Lynch told the Senate Judiciary Committee in March. “It has certainly grown to rival other areas, although I would hesitate to say that we take our attention away from the ports as you noted, the ships and the boats and the American border also.”
The agreement was done in a negotiation with Democrats who were willing to defer to GOP concerns about the retroactive sentence reductions for some criminals, but wanted the overall package to affect the same number of the prison population.
“If you take a step in the direction of something that more Republicans want to see, you have to find another place of agreement on something that Democrats might want to see,” a Senate Democratic aide familiar with the negotiations told the Examiner. “I think there has been a willingness of folks in this process to figure out places where, if there’s a give in one direction there is a take in a different spot in the other direction.”
