A/HRC/7/12/Add.2 page 12 33. Detention has not always been the primary enforcement strategy relied upon by the United States immigration authorities, as it appears to be today. In 1954, the Immigration and Naturalization Service announced that it was abandoning the policy of detention except in rare cases when an individual was considered likely to be a security threat or flight risk. This reluctance to impose needless confinement was based on the concepts of individual liberty and due process, long recognized and protected in the American legal system, and also enshrined in international human rights standards. 34. Sweeping changes in immigration laws in 1996 drastically increased the number of people subject to mandatory, prolonged and indefinite detention. The increasing reliance of the United States authorities on detention as an enforcement strategy has meant that many individuals have been unnecessarily detained for prolonged periods without any finding that they are either a danger to society or a flight risk. These practices have continued despite attempts by the United States Supreme Court to limit the Government’s discretion to indefinitely detain individuals. 35. Certain provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act, as amended by two laws passed in 1996 (the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA)) require mandatory detention, pending removal proceedings, of virtually any non-citizen who is placed in proceedings on criminal grounds, as well as of persons who arrive at the country’s borders in order to seek asylum from persecution without documentation providing for their legal entry into the country. These two laws have significantly increased the number of migrants subject to mandatory detention on a daily basis, since AEDPA requires the mandatory detention of non-citizens convicted of a wide range of offences, and IIRAIRA has further expanded the list of offences for which mandatory detention is required. 36. As a result of these legislative changes, minor drug offences - such as possession of paraphernalia - as well as minor theft or other property-related offences, can result in mandatory detention and in the past decade the use of detention as an immigration enforcement mechanism has become more the norm than the exception in United States immigration enforcement policy. 37. The policy of mandatory detention also strips immigration judges of the authority to determine during a full and fair hearing whether or not an individual presents a danger or a flight risk. Instead, certain previous convictions (and in some cases, merely the admission of having committed an offence) automatically trigger mandatory detention without affording non-citizens an opportunity to be heard as to whether or not they merit release from custody. 38. This policy also deprives immigration judges - and even the Department of Homeland Security - of the authority to order the release of an individual, even when it is clear that he or she poses no danger or flight risk that would warrant such detention.