Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton on Tuesday said changes were needed to make immigration enforcement and detention "more humane, more targeted and more effective," according to the Wall Street Journal.

"I don't think we should put children and vulnerable people into big detention facilities because I think they're at risk," the former secretary of state noted at a roundtable conversation at a Las Vegas high school where she was joined by students known as "DREAMers," a term that -- in reference to the proposed DREAM Act -- describes young undocumented residents who were brought to the United States as children. 

"We have to finally, once and for all, fix our immigration system," Clinton told her audience at the school, where roughly 70 percent of the study body is Latino, according to the New York Times. "It's a family issue; it's an economic issue, too, but it is at its heart a family issue," the former first lady contended.

Clinton also sought to distinguish herself from her Republican competitors by underlining her unequivocal support for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, USA Today reported. 

"When they talk about 'legal status,' that is code for second-class status," she said about her GOP contenders. But "we can't wait any longer for a path to full and equal citizenship," Clinton insisted.

Her remarks "amounted to a full-throated embrace of much of the agenda being pushed by the immigration-rights movement," the Wall Street Journal judged.

Republican presidential candidates in the past have often described the "path to citizenship" as "amnesty"; 2016 GOP frontrunners Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, though known for their more moderate stances on immigration, have also expressed reservations about such a move, USA Today noted.

Rubio, a senator from Florida and son of Cuban immigrants, has said that protecting the border needs to precede any effort on citizenship status for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants already living in the United States.

Bush, a former Florida governor who is married to a Mexican native, has said his "grown-up" immigration plan would include legal status for undocumented migrants, but only after there are assurances that the border is secure.