Mr. Martinez said motor vehicle personnel are expected to use case-by-case discretion on prosecuting people who provided a false Social Security number.
At the height of the cold war, few in the United States found it easy to accept that in this case discretion was the better part of valor.
Though agency officials say the arrangement is simply an example of the case-by-case discretion they often use, the outcome has astonished advocates and experts in immigration enforcement, and raised hopes that it signals some broader use of humanitarian release as the Obama administration vows to overhaul the immigration system.
For the Juvenile Justice Commission, that statistic was a red flag warning that adult parole standards, applied without case-by-case discretion, may be too extreme for juveniles.
A careful prosecutor, however, chooses his cases with discretion.
"The police in appropriate cases exercise discretion and judgment with regard to certain offenses of simple possession of cannabis, and each case is taken on merit," said Superintendent Richard Crawshaw of the Greater Manchester Police's Stockport division.
In cases where discretion was denied, prosecutors and lawyers said, ICE leaned toward caution, passing over many immigrants who did not have criminal records but also did not show deep ties to the United States.
In this case, the discretion and flexibility of the credit relationship, allowing the adjustment of credit conditions to new information difficult to verify, lead to more efficient investment decisions by the funded firms (Mustilli 1995; Corigliano 2007; Schmeits 2002).
As Justice Scalia has said in an immigration case, "prosecutorial discretion" is the "special province of the Executive".
To prove their citizenship, a qualified individual can either apply for a US passport through the US State Department or for a certificate of citizenship through US Citizenship and Immigration Services a process that takes months, even years, depending on the complexity of the case and discretion of the government officials.
On the facts of the case, the discretion conferred on the President and the Minister for Home Affairs by sections 8 and 10 of the Internal Security Act to detain without trial persons believed to threaten national security, to suspend detentions and to revoke such suspensions, was held to fall outside the precedent fact category.
