548
Opinion of Souter, J.
B
Kim's claim is a limited one: not that the Government may not detain LPRs to ensure their appearance at removal hear-for five years. 426 U. S., at 69-70. Reversing a lower court judgment that this statute violated equal protection, we said this:
"In the exercise of its broad power over naturalization and immigration, Congress regularly makes rules that would be unacceptable if applied to citizens. The exclusion of aliens and the reservation of the power to deport have no permissible counterpart in the Federal Government's power to regulate the conduct of its own citizenry. The fact that an Act of Congress treats aliens differently from citizens does not in itself imply that such disparate treatment is 'invidious.' " Id., at 79-80 (footnotes omitted).
Taken in full, the meaning of this paragraph is plain: through the exercise of the deportation and exclusion power, Congress exposes aliens to a treatment (expulsion) that cannot be imposed on citizens. The cases cited in the footnotes to this paragraph accordingly all concern Congress's power to enact grounds of exclusion or deportation. Id., at 80, nn. 14-15 (citing Kleindienst v. Mandel, 408 U. S. 753 (1972); Galvan v. Press, 347 U. S. 522 (1954); and Harisiades v. Shaughnessy, 342 U. S. 580 (1952)); cf. ante, at 522 (quoting Diaz, supra, at 81, n. 17, in turn quoting Harisiades). Nothing in Diaz addresses due process protection of liberty or purports to sanction any particular limitation on the liberty of LPRs under circumstances comparable to those here.
Even on its terms, the Diaz statement is dictum. We acknowledged immediately that "[t]he real question presented by [Diaz] is not whether discrimination between citizens and aliens is permissible; rather, it is whether the statutory discrimination within the class of aliens—allowing benefits to some aliens but not to others—is permissible." 426 U. S., at 80. Our holding that Congress could consider length of residence and immigration status in allocating medical insurance in no way suggests the existence of a federal power to imprison a long-term resident alien when the Government concedes that there is no need to do so.
The Court does not explain why it believes the Diaz dictum to be relevant to this case, other than to repeat it and identify prior instances of its quotation. Ante, at 521-522. The Court resists calling the statement " 'dictum,' " ante, at 521, but it does not deny that Diaz involved "discrimi-nation within the class of aliens" rather than "discrimination between citizens and aliens," 426 U. S., at 80, thus making any suggestion about Congress's power to treat citizens and aliens differently unnecessary to the holding. Nor does the Court deny that Diaz dealt with an equal protection challenge to the allocation of medical insurance and had nothing to
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