question: Why are immigrants held at detention centers instead of being deported?
comment: The migrants being held at detention centers are seeking political asylum. They are being held until their claim to asylum is found valid or not. If it is found valid they are granted entry to the US if it is not found valid they are deported.
passages: In many cases, deportation is done by the government's executive apparatus, and as such is often subject to a simpler legal process (or none), with reduced or no right to trial, legal representation or appeal due to the subject's lack of citizenship. For example, in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, more stringent enforcement of immigration laws were ordered by the executive branch of the U.S. government, which led to the expulsion of up to 2 million Mexican nationals from the United States. In 1954, the executive branch of the U.S. government implemented Operation Wetback, a program created in response to public hysteria about immigration and immigrants from Mexico. Operation Wetback led to the deportation of nearly 1.3 million Mexicans from the United States. Between 2009 and 2016, about 3.2 million people were deported from the United States. Since 1997 U.S. mass deportations of non-citizens particularly convicted felons have risen steadily with the passing into law by the U.S. Congress of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Responsibility Act (IIRRA) which brought sweeping changes to the threshold for deportation of convicted felons that have been criticized by some as having human rights abuses. Since this time, the former U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) has been transformed into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and has renamed deportation as "expedited removal". The ICE website publishes removal statistics annually on its website. According to recent numbers ICE removed a total of 240,255 aliens in FY 2016, a two percent increase over FY 2015, but a 24 percent decrease from FY 2014.
   Because the Immigration and Nationality Act and federal court case decisions mandate ICE to carry out a post order custody review of all individuals slated for deportation, when they are held in detention for more than ninety days, to reassess whether or not the individual is a threat to national security or can be released. Thus, such individuals are rarely left in detention for long periods of time without being given notice of release or deportation.
   Whether people who are awaiting a decision on their deportation are detained or released to live in the United States in the meantime (possibly paying bail) is a matter of both law and discretion of the Justice Department. The policy has varied over time and differs for those with crimes (including entry outside an official checkpoint) versus civil infractions.
  
  The 2001 Supreme Court case "Zadvydas v. Davis" held that immigrants who cannot be deported because no country will accept them cannot be detained indefinitely.
  
  Section::::Immigration in popular culture.
   It has been reported that only a small percentage of the population of detained immigrants have committed crimes. However, of the 32,000 immigrants in ICE detention on January 25, 2009, 18,690 had no criminal convictions, including illegal entry.
   In 2006, Congress began considering more reform proposals that would impose even harsher restrictions for aliens who have broken the law and expand the definition of deportable crimes even further. As a result, minor past offenses can increasingly be used as grounds for expulsion.
  
  Section::::Other countries and territories.
   The United States has been described by many as a "nation of immigrants", but has not always treated immigrants well historically: for example, from 1790 to 1952, American law restricted naturalization to white immigrants. Around the 1910s (with the occurrence of World War I), Ellis Island, formerly an immigration conduit for migrants arriving by sea, became a detention and deportation center for migrants.
   In 2013, deportation prioritization guidance used by Immigration and Customs enforcement, was extended to Customs and Border Protection, under the Obama Administration's prosecutorial discretion plan. This has led to a reduction of the number of deportations of those who are in "non-priority" categories.
   U.S. Presidents and the U.S. Congress have expressly favored some "legal immigrants" because the U.S. Attorney General had admitted them to the United States as refugees, i.e., people who experienced genocides in the past and have no safe country of permanent residence other than the United States. Removing such protected people from the United States constitutes a grave international crime, especially if they qualify as Americans or have physically and continuously resided in the United States for at least 10 years without committing (in such years) any offense that triggers removability.
   In testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in October 2005, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said that the DHS would "Return every single illegal entrant – no exceptions." In his testimony, Chertoff said that in the previous fiscal year, the U.S. Border Patrol immediately returned almost 900,000 Mexicans apprehended entering the U.S. to Mexico, but that of the 160,000 non-Mexican nationals apprehended, about 30,000 were removed from the U.S. Chertoff said that most others were released pending immigration hearings and that few appeared for the hearings. He called for more beds in immigration detention. In July 2006, Chertoff indicated in House committee testimony that an infusion of funding for more immigration detention had allowed DHS to detain almost all non-Mexican illegal immigrants.
   Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear of "The New York Times" wrote in June 2018 that the two administrations before Trump's, which were those of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, did not "embrace" detaining migrant families separately, unlike the Trump administration. George W. Bush's administration had in 2005 implemented Operation Streamline in parts of Texas, which would imprison and prosecute all illegal immigrants entering the country, with an eye for quick deportations. However, they also wrote that the George W. Bush administration "generally" allowed exemptions for children, families with minor children, as well as ill migrants. The Obama administration at one point reenacted Operation Streamline, but without prioritizing first-time illegal immigrants, and it detained families together in administrative detention, not criminal detention.
   In the mid-2000s, the United States, under President George W. Bush and U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, made a number of changes to ramp up immigration enforcement. Examples of this ramp-up included completing the rollout of expedited removal to the entire border zone, phasing out catch and release, and starting Operation Streamline for criminal prosecution of repeat unlawful entrants and unlawful entrants with criminal backgrounds. These changes have been continued by the next President, Barack Obama, with the support of DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement director John T. Morton.
   Between 2009 and 2016, during the Presidency of Barack Obama, about 2.9 million people were deported from the United States.
  
  Section::::Law.
  
  In the 1903 case "Yamataya v. Fisher", also known as the "Japanese Immigrant Case", the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the decisions of administrative or executive officers acting under their delegated powers constituted due process of law and were not subject to judicial review. In the fiscal year 2013, 83 percent of deportation orders came from immigration officers.
  
  Section::::See also.
  
  BULLET::::- Deportation of Cambodians from the United States
  
  BULLET::::- List of people deported from the United States
   In 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court reminded all immigration officials that "once an alien gains admission to our country and begins to develop the ties that go with permanent residence, his constitutional status changes accordingly." That opinion was issued after Congress and the Reagan administration "firmly resettled" in the United States thousands of refugee families from totalitarian states, such as Afghanistan, Cambodia, Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, etc. As U.N.-recognized refugees, these people had permanently lost their homes, farms, businesses, properties, livelihood, families, relatives, pets, etc. They similarly lost their former nationalities after obtaining permanent resident cards (green cards) of the United States, and thus gradually became like the rest of Americans.
   According to Daniel Wilsher, detention has become a tool of power and political control. Immigrants became "aliens" when "the border began to emerge more clearly as a site of politics and regulation". Economics and trade imbalances created wealth and power for countries, and immigrants challenge this. In the 19th century, immigrants were excluded based on race. “Such control initially took place at ports of entry in order to separate out aliens viewed as ‘undesirable’...this was mainly on economic and racial grounds.” Detention has increased and specific and different categories for immigration reasons are ignored in favour of the general category of “undocumented.” With no status, immigrants are subject to detention. Once labelled “illegal,” one's human rights diminish. “We can thus see that detention has now become a technique of control used in a great many different situations to a wide variety of different categories of foreigners.” Immigration is determined by the executive branch and courts have less of a role. Immigrants are not seen as part of the human community and thus have little legal status. “The doubtful status of aliens under domestic legal orders is mirrored in the absence of an international law framework regulating migration and migrants’ rights.” Immigrants are vulnerable because they lack national and international human rights. Immigrants are often detained because they are perceived as a threat to security. Many detention centres do not follow the normal rule of law. “[T]he exclusionary device of making people illegal is so complete that those so labelled scarcely even have human rights.”
   Historically, the deportation of a person not lawfully present in the United States required the approval of an Immigration Judge, unless it was based on an apprehension at the border itself. In November 2002, in order to speed up the process of deportation, the United States Department of Homeland Security expanded the scope of expedited removal to include those apprehended within 100 miles of the United States border and within 14 days of entry. 
   By the end of 2012, as many people had been deported during the first four years of the Obama presidency as were deported during the eight-year presidency of George W. Bush; the number of deportations under Obama totalled 2.5 million by the end of 2015.
  
  Section::::Legal issues.:Deportation.:The AEDPA and IIRIRA Acts of 1996.
   In 1988, Congress introduced the term "aggravated felony" by defining it under 8 U.S.C. § 1101(a), which was amended several times over the years. As of September 30, 1996, an "aggravated felony" only applies to convictions "for which the term of imprisonment was completed within the previous 15 years." After these "15 years" successfully elapse (i.e., without sustaining another aggravated felony conviction), a long-time lawful permanent resident (LPR) automatically becomes entitled to both cancellation of removal and a waiver of inadmissibility. He or she may (at any time and from anywhere in the world) request these popular immigration benefits depending on whichever is more applicable or easiest to obtain. It is important to note that a court-imposed suspended sentence counts as "term of imprisonment" and must be added to the above 15 years, and it makes no difference if the aggravated felony conviction was entered in American Samoa, Australia, Cambodia, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the United States, or in any other country or place in the world.
   Section::::Deportations.
  
  Section::::Deportations.:Jerome.
   Every non-immigrant convicted of any aggravated felony and lawfully removed "must remain outside of the United States for twenty consecutive years from the deportation date before he or she is eligible to re-enter the United States." That stringent rule, however, does not apply to legal immigrants (i.e., refugees and LPRs) who have been deported as aggravated felons. Many previously removed people are believed to be residing inside the United States, some of whom have been removed from the United States about a dozen of times.
   Deportations from the United States increased by more than 60 percent from 2003 to 2008, with Mexicans accounting for nearly two-thirds of those deported. Under the Obama administration, deportations have increased to record levels beyond the level reached by the George W. Bush administration with a projected 400,000 deportations in 2010, 10 percent above the deportation rate of 2008 and 25 percent above 2007. Fiscal year 2011 saw 396,906 deportations, the largest number in the history of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; of those, about 55% had been convicted of crimes or misdemeanors, including: 44,653 convicted of drug-related crimes, 35,927 convicted of driving under the influence, 5,848 convicted of sexual offenses, and 1,119 convicted of homicide.
   Criminal deportation
  
  At law, criminal deportation is where an alien is ordered deported or physically removed from a country by reason of such alien's criminal conduct.
  
  Section::::In United States.
  
  Following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, U.S. President Bill Clinton signed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which made deportation mandatory for certain aliens sentenced to a year or more of imprisonment for an aggravated felony conviction.
   Often, undocumented aliens or individuals lacking legal permission to enter, or remain, in the United States, when apprehended at the U.S. border are detained and placed in removal proceedings in front of an immigration judge. These individuals may include refugees seeking asylum. Under Section 235(b)(2) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, if an individual stopped at the border is believed to be an undocumented immigrant or a threat to national security, they are considered "inadmissible" and classified as an "arriving alien." Individuals detained at the border are only released on a case-to-case basis by the authority of ICE officials.
   After 1816 and the advent of peace the role of the Alien Office seemed unclear and arguably unnecessary. Between 1816 and 1826 only 17 people were deported whereas, during the 1790s, there had been around 50 per year. After 1816 the law had been sparingly used; primarily to deport members of Bonaparte's inner circle. Between 1821 and 1826 there was only one deportation, destined to be the last for 75 years.
   In 2014, the number of individuals apprehended at the border was up 16 percent from the previous fiscal year, and the number of deportations from within the United States dropped 24 percent from the previous fiscal year. That year, Operation Streamline was ended. The number of individuals deported by the Obama Administration up through 2014, was lower than that of any previous administration.
  
  Section::::High cost.
   Most of those arrested were deported. While in detention facilities, many signed papers agreeing to voluntary deportation with no appeal. Most did not have access to telephones, lawyers, or the Consulate of their destination before they made this decision. Many of those who did not agree to voluntary deportation were detained for months longer. Some who were ultimately able to prove legal residency were held for weeks in detention facilities out of state.
  
  Approximately 240 of the 1,297 arrested were ultimately charged with crimes (in addition to administrative immigration violations). About 65 were charged with identity theft.
  
presuppositions: Detention centers purpose is to deport immigrants.
corrections: Detention centers purpose is to hold migrants seeking political asylum until the migrants claim to asylum is found valid.
raw_presuppositions: Detention centers purpose is to deport immigrants. Immigrants held at detention centers are illegal and must be deported.
raw_corrections: Detention centers purpose is to hold migrants seeking political asylum until the migrants claim to asylum is found valid. Immigrants held at detention centers may be granted entry if their claim to asylum is found valid.