Last year, more than 12,000 people moved through detention rooms in 105 of Macy's stores, including more than 1,900 at the Manhattan store, in Herald Square.
That lawyer, Dimitrios Vouros, said late last year that only 7 of the 4,469 migrants passing through detention had asked for asylum.
Research by nongovernmental organizations suggests that all the refugees had passed through detention camps on islands just off the coast of Thailand.
Federal courts up to the Supreme Court have waded through detention questions and in several major cases the courts have rejected administration contentions.
But the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group based in Britain, had tallied 30,000 people jailed as of April, and 200,000 who have cycled through detention facilities during two and a half years of conflict.
Though British freedoms have been eroded most infamously through detention without charge torture itself has been thought off limits since the prime minister of the day gave assurances in 1972 that British forces would never use it to aid interrogations.
