U.S. to overhaul immigration system

Detailing an overhaul announced in broad terms in August, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and John Morton, assistant secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the measures were intended to make the nation's much-criticized, $2.6 billion-a-year immigration detention system safer and more efficient, without adding to its costs.

The changes come as President Obama has been pressured by immigrant advocates to reform a 32,000-bed system that has quadrupled in size since 1995, while he has said that tough enforcement policies are key to winning approval by Congress for any push to legalize illegal immigrants.

"We accepted that we were going to continue to have - and increase, potentially - the number of detainees, so with that, we want to accomplish several goals," Napolitano said, including greater federal oversight and accountability of more than 300 local jails, state prisons, and private facilities.

Napolitano said that by next October, ICE would rank detainees by flight risk and public danger, set new detention-facility requirements based on those risk levels, and issue bids for two new-model detention centers.