detention

The Department of Homeland Security Secretary on Tuesday released a report on the immigrant detention system and announced plans to improve detention conditions for the approximately 30,000 immigrants being held on immigration violations.
The report finds that although many immigrants have not committed crimes, they’re held in secure facilities designed for criminals and often in far [...]

A U.S. Marine reservist and general has created a detailed report recommending that up to 400 of the 600 prisoners at the U.S.-run prison at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan have done nothing wrong and should be released, NPR reports.
Lawyers have been making that argument for years now, but the United States has insisted [...]

Responding to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Department of Homeland Security today acknowledged 11 deaths of immigrants in U.S. detention facilities that the agency had previously failed to disclose.
In April, DHS responded to the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit with a “comprehensive” list of all deaths in detention, which totaled [...]

From The Washington Post:
The Obama administration announced plans Thursday to overhaul the nation’s much-criticized immigration detention system by strengthening federal oversight and centralizing a 32,000-bed system now scattered throughout 350 local jails, state prisons and contract facilities, officials said.
The goal in three to five years is to redesign and begin rebuilding a system that houses [...]

An anonymous White House quote on preventive detention has put civil liberties advocates on the offensive.

I’m still trying to figure out how the Obama administration could believe that civil liberties groups gave it cover to issue an executive order authorizing “prolonged detention” of suspected terrorists, as Dafna Linzer and Peter Finn reported on Friday. Ginny Sloan, president of the Constitution Project — which has made its feelings on detention known [...]

A Guantanamo detainee’s transfer to the United States for trial is at odds with the president’s call for a new system of indefinite imprisonment.

Despite Obama’s promises to “uphold our most cherished values . . . in times of ease and in eras of upheaval,” he is reserving an extraordinary and highly controversial right to hold suspected terror supporters indefinitely without trial.

President Obama just announced that Harold Hongju Koh, the head of Yale Law School and a human rights official during the Clinton administration, will be the legal adviser to the State Department. That’s big news as the administration proceeds with its review of interrogations, detentions and renditions policy. Koh, recall, dramatically testified at Alberto Gonzales’ [...]

In a rare victory for torture victims, a federal judge yesterday ruled that detainees who claim they were tortured at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq can move ahead with their lawsuit against defense contractor CACI, which t the U.S. government hired to assist in interrogations of Iraqi prisoners.
CNN reports that U.S. District Court [...]