494
Opinion of Ginsburg, J.
In Oestereich, the Selective Service Board had withdrawn a ministry student's statutory exemption from the draft after he engaged in an act of protest. See 393 U. S., at 234. The student brought suit to restrain his induction, and this Court allowed the suit to go forward, notwithstanding a statutory bar of preinduction judicial review. Finding the Board's action "blatantly lawless," the Court concluded that to require the student to raise his claim through habeas corpus or as a defense to a criminal prosecution would be "to construe the Act with unnecessary harshness." Id., at 238.
The precedent in point suggests that interlocutory intervention in Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) proceedings would be in order, notwithstanding a statutory bar, if the INS acts in bad faith, lawlessly, or in patent violation of constitutional rights. Resembling, but more stringent than, the evaluation made when a preliminary injunction is sought, see, e. g., Doran v. Salem Inn, Inc., 422 U. S. 922, 931 (1975) ("The traditional standard for granting a preliminary injunction requires the plaintiff to show that in the absence of its issuance he will suffer irreparable injury and also that he is likely to prevail on the merits."), this test would demand, as an essential element, demonstration of a strong likelihood of success on the merits. The merits of respondents' objection are too uncertain to establish that likelihood. The Attorney General argued in the court below and in the petition for certiorari that the INS may select for deportation aliens who it has reason to believe have carried out fundraising for a foreign terrorist organization. See App. to Pet. for Cert. 20a; Pet. for Cert. 21-25. Whether the INS may do so presents a complex question in an un-charted area of the law, which we should not rush to resolve here.
Relying on Middlesex County Ethics Comm. v. Garden State Bar Assn., 457 U. S. 423 (1982), respondents argue that their inability to raise their selective enforcement claims
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