482
Opinion of the Court
ban does not extend to individual cases. To find in this an affirmative grant of jurisdiction is to go beyond what the language will bear.
We think the seeming anomaly that prompted the parties' strained readings of § 1252(g)—and that at least accompanied the Court of Appeals' strained reading—is a mirage. The parties' interpretive acrobatics flow from the belief that § 306(c)(1) cannot be read to envision a straightforward application of the "[e]xcept as provided in this section" portion of § 1252(g), since that would produce in all pending INS cases jurisdictional restrictions identical to those that were contained in IIRIRA anyway. That belief, however, rests on the unexamined assumption that § 1252(g) covers the universe of deportation claims—that it is a sort of "zipper" clause that says "no judicial review in deportation cases unless this section provides judicial review." In fact, what § 1252(g) says is much narrower. The provision applies only to three discrete actions that the Attorney General may take: her "decision or action" to "commence proceedings, adjudicate cases, or execute removal orders." (Emphasis added.) There are of course many other decisions or actions that may be part of the deportation process—such as the decisions to open an investigation, to surveil the suspected violator, to reschedule the deportation hearing, to include various provisions in the final order that is the product of the adjudication, and to refuse reconsideration of that order.
It is implausible that the mention of three discrete events along the road to deportation was a shorthand way of referring to all claims arising from deportation proceedings. Not because Congress is too unpoetic to use synecdoche, but because that literary device is incompatible with the need for precision in legislative drafting. We are aware of no other instance in the United States Code in which language such as this has been used to impose a general jurisdictional limitation; and that those who enacted IIRIRA were familiar with the normal manner of imposing such a limitation is dem-
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