Page:Kirstjen M. Nielsen, Secretary of Homeland Security, et al. v. Mony Preap, et al..pdf/23

Rh at 719. From Congress’s perspective, after all, it is irrelevant that the Secretary could go on detaining criminal aliens subject to a bond hearing. Congress enacted mandatory detention precisely out of concern that such individualized hearings could not be trusted to reveal which “deportable criminal aliens who are not detained” might “continue to engage in crime [or] fail to appear for their removal hearings.” Demore, 538 U. S., at 513. And having thus required the Secretary to impose mandatory detention without bond hearings immediately, for safety’s sake, Congress could not have meant for judges to “enforce” this duty in case of delay by—of all things—forbidding its execution. Cf. Montalvo-Murillo, 495 U. S., at 720 (“The end of exacting compliance with the letter” of the Bail Reform Act’s requirement that a defendant receive a hearing immediately upon his first appearance before a judicial officer “cannot justify the means of exposing the public to an increased likelihood of violent crimes by persons on bail, an evil the statute aims to prevent”).

Especially hard to swallow is respondents’ insistence that for an alien to be subject to mandatory detention under §1226(c), the alien must be arrested on the day he walks out of jail (though respondents allow that it need not be at the jailhouse door—the “parking lot” or “bus stop” would do). Tr. of Oral Arg. 44. “Assessing the situation in realistic and practical terms, it is inevitable that” respondents’ unsparing deadline will often be missed for reasons beyond the Federal Government’s control. Montalvo-Murillo, 495 U. S., at 720. Cf. Regions Hospital v. Shalala, 522 U. S. 448, 459, n. 3 (1998) (“The Secretary’s failure to meet the deadline, a not uncommon occurrence when heavy loads are thrust on administrators, does not mean that [she] lacked power to act beyond it”). To give just one example, state and local officials sometimes rebuff the Government’s request that they give notice when a criminal alien will be released. Indeed, over a