Cite as: 525 U. S. 471 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
discretion. . . . Efforts to challenge the refusal to exercise such discretion on behalf of specific aliens sometimes have been favorably considered by the courts, upon contentions that there was selective prosecution in violation of equal protection or due process, such as improper reliance on political considerations, on racial, religious, or nationality discriminations, on arbitrary or unconstitutional criteria, or on other grounds constituting abuse of discretion." Gordon, Mailman, & Yale-Loehr, supra, § 72.03[2][a] (footnotes omitted).
Such litigation was possible because courts read § 1105a's prescription that the Hobbs Act shall be "the sole and exclusive procedure for the judicial review of all final orders of deportation" to be inapplicable to various decisions and actions leading up to or consequent upon final orders of deportation, and relied on other jurisdictional statutes to permit review. See, e. g., Cheng Fan Kwok v. INS, 392 U. S. 206 (1968) (review of refusal to stay deportation); Ramallo v. Reno, Civ. No. 95-01851 (D. D. C., July 23, 1996) (review of execution of removal order), described in and rev'd on other grounds, 114 F. 3d 1210 (CADC 1997); AADC I, 70 F. 3d 1045 (CA9 1995) (review of commencement of deportation proceedings); Lennon v. INS, 527 F. 2d 187, 195 (CA2 1975) (same, dicta). Section 1252(g) seems clearly designed to give some measure of protection to "no deferred action" decisions and similar discretionary determinations, providing that if they are reviewable at all, they at least will not be made the bases for separate rounds of judicial intervention outside the streamlined process that Congress has designed.9
9 This history explains why Justice Souter ought not find it "hard to imagine that Congress meant to bar aliens already in proceedings . . . from challenging the commencement of proceedings against them, but to permit the same aliens to challenge, say, the decision of the Attorney General to open an investigation of them or to issue a show-cause order." Post, at 506 (dissenting opinion). It was the acts covered by § 1252(g) that had prompted challenges to the Attorney General's exercise of prosecutorial
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