Felix Frankfurter

“ If the Attorney General's conscience is satisfied to act on considerations that he does not desire to expose to the light of day or to impart to an alien whose liberty may be at stake, thereby involving the fate of an innocent family, Congress leaves him free to do so. ”

“ When the Attorney General scrutinizes 'confidential information,' at all events it is the Attorney General who does so. If he is unable to carry out the discretion vested solely in him to act on whatever he chooses to act upon, he must either devise a shifting process that meets the elementary decencies of procedure or advise Congress of his inability to carry out the extraordinary responsibility which it has reposed in him and not in his subordinates. ”

“ But Congress has not seen fit to invest his subordinates with such arbitrary authority over the lives of men.
One is not unmindful of the fact that the Attorney General is burdened with a vast range of duties, and that he, too, has only twenty-four hours in a day. To be sure, one of his predecessors in the administration of our immigration laws, President Taft's Secretary of Commerce and Labor, himself examined every deportation file in which an appeal was lodged. ”