Opinion of the Court
never convicted or perhaps even charged with a crime, once she arrested them. Yet she would be free not to arrest them to begin with (or so the Court of Appeals assumed), since she is obligated to arrest aliens “when… released,” and there was no prior custody for these aliens to be “released” from. Therefore, the court concluded, the Government’s position has the absurd implication that aliens who were never charged with a crime need not be arrested pending a removal determination, but if they are arrested, they must be detained and cannot be released on bond or parole.
We agree that it would be very strange for Congress to forbid the release of aliens who need not be arrested in the first place, but the fact is that the Government’s reading (and ours) does not have that incongruous result. The real anomalies here would flow instead from the Court of Appeals’ interpretation.
To begin with the latter point: Under the Court of Appeals’ reading, the mandatory-detention scheme would be gentler on terrorists than it is on garden-variety offenders. To see why, recall first that subparagraphs (A)–(C) cover aliens who are inadmissible or deportable based on the commission of certain criminal offenses, and there is no dispute that the statute authorizes their mandatory detention when they are released from criminal custody. And the crimes covered by these subparagraphs include, for example, any drug offense by an adult punishable by more than one year of imprisonment, see §§1182(a)(2), 1226(c)(1)(A), as well as a variety of tax offenses, see §§1226(c)(1)(B), 1227(a)(2)(A)(iii); Kawashima v. Holder, 565 U. S. 478 (2012). But notice that aliens who fall within subparagraph (D), by contrast, may never have been arrested on criminal charges–which according to the court below would exempt them from mandatory detention. Yet this subparagraph covers the very sort of aliens for which Congress was most likely to have wanted to
