As you heard from one of our earlier witnesses, the current law allows for detention so that we can determine folks' identity. We believe that mandatory detention of up to 12 months is excessive, given that it's applied to particular groups of folk deemed to be irregular arrivals. That the time period has been lessened doesn’t minimize the fact that we have introduced something called mandatory detention without judicial review into our system, when existing policy allows us to detain folks whose identities we can't prove and whom we have concerns about.
On April 30th, 2012. See this statement in context.