Page:Kirstjen M. Nielsen, Secretary of Homeland Security, et al. v. Mony Preap, et al..pdf/22

18 timing provisions, the federal courts will not in the ordinary course impose their own coercive sanction.’ ” Barnhart, 537 U. S., at 159 (quoting United States v. James Daniel Good Real Property, 510 U. S. 43, 63 (1993)).

This principle for interpreting time limits on statutory mandates was a fixture of the legal backdrop when Congress enacted §1226(c). Cf. Woodford v. Garceau, 538 U. S. 202, 209 (2003) (relying on the “legal backdrop” against which “Congress legislated” to clarify what Congress enacted). Indeed, we have held of a statute enacted just four years before §1226(c) that because of our case law at the time–never since abrogated–Congress was “presumably aware that we do not readily infer congressional intent to limit an agency’s power to get a mandatory job done merely from a specification to act by a certain time.” Barnhart, 537 U. S., at 160 (relying on Brock v. Pierce County, 476 U. S. 253 (1986)). Here this principle entails that even if subsection (c)(1) were the sole source of authority to arrest aliens without granting them hearings, that authority would not evaporate just because officials had transgressed subsection (c)(1)’s command to arrest aliens immediately “when… released.”

Respondents object that the rule invoked in Montalvo-Murillo and related cases does not apply here. In those cases, respondents argue, the governmental authority at issue would have disappeared entirely if time limits were enforced–whereas here the Secretary could still arrest aliens well after their release under the general language in §1226(a).

But the whole premise of respondents’ argument is that if the Secretary could no longer act under §1226(c), she would lose a specific power–the power to arrest and detain criminal aliens without a bond hearing. If that is so, then as in other cases, accepting respondents’ deadline-based argument would be inconsistent with “the design and function of the statute.” Montalvo-Murillo, 495 U. S.,