570
Opinion of Souter, J.
Government also presented the following excerpt of a statement of the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee:
" 'No particular hardship is going to be worked on anyone because, bear this fact in mind, it is not mandatory on the Attorney General to hold people in detention. He is given discretionary power. If in his judgment one of the class of people I have just mentioned ought to be held for paramount national reasons, he may detain him, but he is not obliged to hold anybody, although I trust that in every case of a subversive or a hardened criminal he will.'" Id., at 19 (quoting 96 Cong. Rec. 10449-10450 (1950) (statement of Rep. Walter) (emphasis added in Brief for Respondent in Carlson v. Landon, supra)).
In short, Carlson addressed a very different scheme from the one here.
It is also beside the point for the Court to suggest that "like respondent in the present case," the Carlson petitioners challenged their detention because "there had been no finding that they were unlikely to appear for their deportation proceedings." Ante, at 524. Each of them was detained after being found to be "a menace to the public interest," 342 U. S., at 541, and their challenge, unlike Kim's, was that the INS had locked them up for an impermissible reason (danger to society) whereas only a finding of risk of flight would have justified detention. Id., at 533-534 ("It is urged . . . that where there is no evidence to justify a fear of unavailability for the hearings or for the carrying out of a possible judgment of deportation, denial of bail under the circumstances of these cases is an abuse of discretion"); see also id., at 551 (Black, J., dissenting) ("A power to put in jail because dangerous cannot be derived from a power to deport").25
25 Similarly, the question presented in Butterfield v. Zydok, argued and decided together with Carlson, was "[w]hether, in exercising his discretion to grant or withhold bail pending final determination of the deportability
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