533US2 Unit: $U87 [10-21-02 18:35:10] PAGES PGT: OPIN Cite as: 533 U. S. 678 (2001) 703 Scalia, J., dissenting from “physical restraint” or freedom from “indefinite detention,” ante, at 689, 690, but it is at bottom a claimed right of release into this country by an individual who concededly has no legal right to be here. There is no such constitutional right. Like a criminal alien under final order of removal, an inadmissible alien at the border has no right to be in the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Case, 130 U. S. 581, 603 (1889). In Shaughnessy v. United States ex rel. Mezei, 345 U. S. 206 (1953), we upheld potentially indefinite detention of such an inadmissible alien whom the Government was unable to return anywhere else. We said that “we [did] not think that respondent’s continued exclusion deprives him of any statutory or constitutional right.” Id., at 215. While four Members of the Court thought that Mezei deserved greater procedural protections (the Attorney General had refused to divulge any information as to why Mezei was being detained, id., at 209), no Justice asserted that Mezei had a substantive constitutional right to release into this country. And Justice Jackson’s dissent, joined by Justice Frankfurter, affirmatively asserted the opposite, with no contradiction from the Court: “Due process does not invest any alien with a right to enter the United States, nor confer on those admitted the right to remain against the national will. Nothing in the Constitution requires admission or sufferance of aliens hostile to our scheme of government.” Id., at 222–223 (emphasis added). Insofar as a claimed legal right to release into this country is concerned, an alien under final order of removal stands on an equal footing with an inadmissible alien at the threshold of entry: He has no such right. The Court expressly declines to apply or overrule Mezei, ante, at 694, but attempts to distinguish it—or, I should rather say, to obscure it in a legal fog. First, the Court claims that “[t]he distinction between an alien who has effected an entry into the United States and one who has never entered runs throughout immigration law.” Ante, at 693. True enough, but only where that distinction makes perfect