712
Kennedy, J., dissenting
als to force dangerous aliens upon us. One of the more alarming aspects of the Court's new venture into foreign affairs management is the suggestion that the district court can expand or contract the reasonable period of detention based on its own assessment of the course of negotiations with foreign powers. The Court says it will allow the Executive to perform its duties on its own for six months; after that, foreign relations go into judicially supervised receivership.
The cases which the Court relies upon to support the imposition of presumptions are inapposite. The rule announced in Cheff v. Schnackenberg, 384 U. S. 373 (1966)— "that sentences exceeding six months for criminal contempt may not be imposed by federal courts absent a jury trial"— was based on the definition of a "petty offense" that was still operable in the United States Code, and was proper "under the peculiar power of the federal courts to revise sentences in contempt cases." Id., at 380. The majority can point to no similar statutory or judicial source for its authority to create its own time-based rule in these cases. It cites only an observation in a brief filed by the Government in United States v. Witkovich, O. T. 1956, No. 295, pp. 8-9, see ante, at 701, relying, in turn, on doubts expressed in a 1952 Senate Report concerning detention for longer than six months under an Act with standards different from, and far less precise than, those applicable here. In County of Riverside v. McLaughlin, 500 U. S. 44 (1991), our reasonableness presumption for delays of less than 48 hours between an arrest and a probable-cause hearing was, as the majority recognizes, ante, at 701, based on the "Court of Appeals' determination of the time required to complete those procedures." 500 U. S., at 57. Here, as far as we know, the 6-month period bears no particular relationship to how long it now takes to deport any group of aliens, or, for that matter, how long it took in the past to remove. Zadvydas' case itself demonstrates that the repatriation process may often take years to
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