Alito, J., dissenting
radical theory and instead holds only that, with some small and equivocal limitations that I will discuss, no party may challenge the Executive’s “arrest and prosecution policies.” Ante, at 12, n. 5. But the Court provides no principled explanation for drawing the line at this point, and that raises the concern that the Court’s only reason for framing its rule as it does is that no more is needed to dispose of this case. In future cases, Presidential power may be extended even further. That disturbing possibility is bolstered by the Court’s refusal to reject the Government’s broader argument.
As I will explain, nothing in our precedents even remotely supports this grossly inflated conception of “executive Power,” U. S. Const., Art. II, §1, which seriously infringes the “legislative Powers” that the Constitution grants to Congress, Art. I, §1. At issue here is Congress’s authority to control immigration, and “[t]his Court has repeatedly emphasized that ‘over no conceivable subject is the legislative power of Congress more complete than it is over’ the admission of aliens.” Fiallo v. Bell, 430 U. S. 787, 792 (1977). In the exercise of that power, Congress passed and President Clinton signed a law that commands the detention and removal of aliens who have been convicted of certain particularly dangerous crimes. The Secretary of Homeland Security, however, has instructed his agents to disobey this legislative command and instead follow a different policy that is more to his liking. And the Court now says that no party injured by this policy is allowed to challenge it in court.
That holding not only violates the Constitution’s allocation of authority among the three branches of the Federal Government; it also undermines federalism. This Court has held that the Federal Government’s authority in the field of immigration severely restricts the ability of States to enact laws or follow practices that address harms resulting from illegal immigration. See Arizona v. United States,
