Higher Representation Costs Alone Do Not Establish Lawyers’ Standing to Challenge Immigration Disclosure Practices

1. Introduction

This decision addresses whether immigration lawyers and legal-service providers may challenge government document-disclosure practices based on the additional expense and effort those practices impose on their representation of clients. The First Circuit held that the appellants lacked Article III standing. Their allegations did not establish the asserted uniform, department-wide nondisclosure policy, and, independently, their increased representation costs did not establish the direct organizational injury required under the Supreme Court’s recent standing jurisprudence.

The appellants were Greater Boston Legal Services, Araujo & Fisher, LLC, and attorneys Annelise M. Araujo and Stefanie Fisher. They sued the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”), its component agencies—United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”), and Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”)—and agency officials in their official capacities.

The dispute concerned access to government-held immigration records, including application materials, interview notes, criminal-history records, and documents maintained in an individual’s “A-file.” The appellants alleged that the agencies systematically directed noncitizens and their counsel to the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”), rather than producing necessary records directly in immigration proceedings.

The appellants challenged this alleged “Nondisclosure Policy” under the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”), contending that it conflicted with the Immigration and Nationality Act (“INA”), DHS regulations, and the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. The appellate decision, however, resolves only the threshold question of standing—not whether the challenged disclosure practices are lawful.

2. Background and Summary of the Opinion

The practical dispute

According to the appellants, FOIA was an inadequate substitute for timely access to records needed to prepare immigration cases. Responses could arrive late, omit documents, or contain redactions. Although the opinion identifies FOIA’s ordinary twenty-business-day response framework and a possible ten-business-day extension for unusual circumstances, the appellants alleged that the agencies regularly missed the applicable deadlines.

To compensate, lawyers interviewed clients and relatives, contacted former counsel, obtained court records, sought continuances, pursued FOIA appeals, and sometimes prepared alternative applications. These activities consumed resources and reduced the number of additional clients the appellants could represent. Because much of their work was performed for flat fees, additional effort often generated no additional compensation.

Proceedings in the district court

1. Initial dismissal ruling: The district court dismissed the due-process theory and the removal-related APA allegations, while allowing the asylum-related APA theory to proceed.
2. Amended complaint: The appellants added allegations concerning ICE’s response to a Ninth Circuit decision recognizing access to certain immigration records. The district court again dismissed the removal-related claim, concluding that the appellants had not identified an applicable disclosure obligation supporting their challenge.
3. Summary judgment: On the surviving affirmative-asylum claim, the district court ruled for the government. It found that the record did not establish a formal DHS policy and that, even assuming such a policy existed, the challenged practice did not violate the cited regulation or constitute arbitrary and capricious action.

The appellate disposition

The First Circuit raised standing on its own initiative and ordered supplemental briefing following oral argument. It then affirmed the judgment on grounds different from those relied on below.

The court gave two principal reasons:

• The appellants had not established the asserted uniform DHS-wide policy. Their examples reflected differing practices across agencies and proceedings, leaving the claimed policy-based injury insufficiently concrete.
• Even assuming the policy existed, the appellants’ additional expenditures and reduced capacity to accept clients did not establish the direct interference with core business activities necessary to support their organizational-standing theory.

The court expressly declined to reach the merits. Its affirmance therefore does not adopt the district court’s substantive conclusions about the INA, DHS regulations, or due process.

3. Analysis: Precedents Cited and Their Influence

A. The obligation to examine jurisdiction

Hochendoner v. Genzyme Corp., 823 F.3d 724 (1st Cir. 2016), supplied the starting principle: federal courts possess limited jurisdiction and must verify their authority before deciding substantive questions.

Fideicomiso De La Tierra Del Caño Martin Peña v. Fortuño, 604 F.3d 7 (1st Cir. 2010), quoting Doyle v. Huntress, Inc., 419 F.3d 3 (1st Cir. 2005), established that this obligation exists even when the parties do not raise the issue. These authorities explain why the First Circuit could address standing despite the district court’s failure to analyze it and the government’s failure to challenge it initially. Agreement or silence by the parties cannot supply federal jurisdiction.

B. Pleading standards and the three standing requirements

Kolackovsky v. Town of Rockport, 165 F.4th 114 (1st Cir. 2026), quoting Lyman v. Baker, 954 F.3d 351 (1st Cir. 2020), provided the court’s stated approach to the allegations: accept well-pleaded, nonconclusory, nonspeculative facts and draw reasonable inferences for the plaintiff. That qualification mattered because the court regarded “Nondisclosure Policy” as a conclusory description of disparate practices rather than an adequately established uniform policy.

Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, 578 U.S. 330 (2016), placed the burden of establishing standing on the appellants and supplied the requirement that a concrete injury must actually exist. California v. Trump, 183 F.4th 52 (1st Cir. 2026), quoting TransUnion LLC v. Ramírez, 594 U.S. 413 (2021), reinforced that injury must be concrete, particularized, and actual or imminent.

Lyman v. Baker also supplied the traceability principle: the injury must be fairly attributable to the challenged conduct rather than independent third-party action. Lujan v. Defs. of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555 (1992), supplied the redressability requirement: favorable judicial relief must likely remedy the injury, not merely conceivably do so.

Finally, Clapper v. Amnesty Int'l USA, 568 U.S. 412 (2013), supported the rejection of speculative or attenuated injury. Together, these decisions required more than a general account of difficult document collection. The appellants needed a sufficiently concrete injury connected to the particular policy they sought to enjoin.

C. Identifying the challenged agency action

Norton v. S. Utah Wilderness All., 542 U.S. 55 (2004), supported the court’s conclusion that disconnected examples of agency conduct do not, without more, establish the agency-wide action alleged in an APA challenge. The appellants combined ICE practices in removal proceedings with USCIS practices in asylum adjudications. The court found that differences among agencies, officers, proceedings, and disclosure methods undermined that aggregation.

The opinion also referred to the district court’s decisions in Greater Boston Legal Svcs. v. U.S. Dep't of Homeland Sec., 2025 WL 1725826, and Greater Boston Legal Svcs. v. U.S. Dep't of Homeland Sec., 2022 WL 138629. Those references supported its discussion of the inadequately established policy; they did not convert the appellate disposition into a merits endorsement of every ruling below.

D. The central comparison: organizational injury versus resource expenditure

Havens Realty Corp. v. Coleman

In Havens Realty Corp. v. Coleman, 455 U.S. 363 (1982), a housing organization provided counseling and referral services. A housing provider told its white employee that apartments were available while telling its Black employee that none were available. The organization alleged that discriminatory steering impaired its services and drained its resources.

The Supreme Court recognized injury because the conduct perceptibly impaired the organization’s activities, producing a consequent resource drain. That was more than frustration of an abstract commitment to fair housing.

The appellants relied on this reasoning: obtaining immigration records was part of their legal work, and the alleged nondisclosure practice made that work significantly more difficult. The First Circuit nevertheless distinguished the cases. In its reading of Havens Realty Corp. v. Coleman, false information directly impaired the organization’s ability to give accurate housing advice. Additional expense followed that independent impairment; expenditure alone did not create it.

FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine

FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, 602 U.S. 367 (2024), was the decisive interpretive authority. Medical associations challenging FDA action alleged that they had spent resources on research and advocacy in response to the challenged regulations. The Supreme Court rejected the proposition that an organization acquires standing whenever it redirects resources to oppose government conduct.

That decision treated Havens Realty Corp. v. Coleman as an unusual case involving direct interference with core business activities and warned against extending it beyond its context. An organization cannot manufacture standing merely by spending money to gather information and advocate against conduct that has not otherwise concretely injured it.

The First Circuit applied that limitation to legal-service providers. Although the appellants characterized the additional work as integral to representation, the court emphasized that alternative methods of obtaining information remained available. It treated the asserted costs as burdens of undertaking representation, rather than consequences of a separately established direct organizational injury.

E. Authorities addressing lawyers’ costs and indirect professional interests

Cent. States, Se. & Sw. Areas Pension Fund v. Cent. Cartage Co., 76 F.3d 114 (7th Cir. 1996), supported the observation that lawyers necessarily face opportunity costs: time devoted to one matter cannot be devoted to another. The appellants’ inability to accept as many additional clients as they wished therefore did not, by itself, distinguish their injury from ordinary professional resource constraints.

Kowalski v. Tesmer, 543 U.S. 125 (2004), supplied examples illustrating the danger of treating an attorney’s income-related interest as enough to support generalized challenges on behalf of hypothetical clients. The First Circuit used those examples to explain why increased representation costs cannot automatically permit lawyers to challenge every rule affecting their practice areas.

Mil.-Veterans Advoc. v. Sec'y of Veterans Affs., 7 F.4th 1110 (Fed. Cir. 2021), reinforced the same limiting concern: an attorney cannot obtain standing to challenge every regulation that may negatively affect a client’s eligibility for benefits merely because the attorney represents such clients.

F. Cases preserving standing where legal practice is directly affected

Marasco & Nesselbush, LLP v. Collins, 6 F.4th 150 (1st Cir. 2021), involved a law firm’s challenge to Social Security Administration procedures that hindered its ability to collect payment for legal services. The opinion cited it to confirm that legal-service providers can have standing when government action directly affects their own business activities.

U.S. Dep't of Lab. v. Triplett, 494 U.S. 715 (1990), involved third-party standing to challenge restrictions on attorney compensation that left claimants unable to obtain representation for black-lung benefits claims. It demonstrated that lawyers are not categorically prohibited from asserting clients’ rights.

These decisions limit the reach of the present holding. The distinction is not between lawyers and other plaintiffs, but between direct interference with legal practice or compensation and the additional effort associated with representing clients affected by government policy.

G. The immigration-disclosure precedent

Dent v. Holder, 627 F.3d 365 (9th Cir. 2010), held that noncitizens required to establish lawful presence in removal proceedings must have access to their A-files. The appellants alleged that ICE confined compliance to the Ninth Circuit, construed the decision narrowly there, and continued directing other requesters to FOIA.

This precedent explained the amended complaint and the asserted removal-related disclosure obligation. It did not determine the First Circuit’s holding. Because the court found no standing, it neither adopted nor rejected the Ninth Circuit’s substantive interpretation.

4. Legal Reasoning

A. A policy label could not substitute for proof of the challenged practice

The appellants sought broad relief against a department-wide policy. Their supporting examples, however, concerned different component agencies and different procedural settings. The opinion emphasized that disclosure could depend on factors such as an asylum officer’s discretion.

The government presented the failure to establish a policy primarily as a causation and redressability problem. The court also treated it as an injury-in-fact problem: without the asserted uniform policy, the claimed policy-based withholding or delay was too uncertain to establish concrete injury as framed.

The important distinction is between showing that particular document requests caused difficulty and establishing the broad agency action alleged to produce the legally relevant injury. The court found that the latter showing was missing.

B. The alternative holding assumed the policy existed

The court then addressed organizational standing on an independent basis. Even assuming a Nondisclosure Policy existed, it concluded that the appellants’ additional costs were insufficient under FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine.

This alternative analysis makes the ruling more consequential than a decision confined to inadequate allegations of a policy. Better evidence of coordination across DHS would not, by itself, cure the separate defect the court identified in the appellants’ theory of injury.

C. Resource diversion required a preceding direct injury

The court distinguished two sequences:

• Potentially sufficient: challenged conduct directly impairs an organization’s activities, and the organization consequently incurs expenses.
• Insufficient here: an organization undertakes additional work in response to government conduct and identifies that expenditure itself as the injury.

The appellants’ flat-fee arrangements made the additional work economically significant, but the court did not regard that feature as changing the character of the asserted injury. Nor did their mission of assisting noncitizens automatically transform increased workload into direct interference with core business activities.

The court applied the same analysis to the individual attorneys and organizational appellants because the parties treated their injuries as indistinguishable. It did not recognize a relaxed standing standard for nonprofit providers or a separate standard for private lawyers.

D. Important analytical limits

The opinion should not be read as holding that financial loss is never a concrete injury. Its discussion of attorney-payment cases expressly preserves standing where government action directly interferes with compensation or legal-service provision.

There is also a significant boundary question in the decision: when do burdens on professional work become direct impairment rather than ordinary representation costs? The court resolved that question against these appellants by emphasizing alternative information sources and the potentially sweeping consequences of their theory. Future cases involving a demonstrated inability to perform a service may present a different situation.

Similarly, the absence of a uniform department-wide policy does not necessarily eliminate every possible injury from a particular agency’s conduct. The ruling concerns the broad challenge presented, not every narrower challenge that might arise from a concrete refusal or delay.

5. Potential Impact

Legal-service organizations must identify more than added workload

The decision makes resource-diversion allegations substantially less useful when they merely describe the expense of assisting clients affected by a policy. Providers will need to identify a direct injury to their own operations, compensation, or service provision rather than rely exclusively on increased effort and foregone clients.

Broad APA challenges require a clearly identified target

Litigants seeking agency-wide relief should distinguish among agencies, proceedings, policies, and individual decisions. Evidence of an established directive or consistently implemented practice may be important where the asserted injury depends on a common policy. Combining similar but materially different experiences under one label risks the problem identified here.

Claims by directly affected noncitizens remain unresolved

The opinion does not determine whether a noncitizen denied necessary records could establish standing or prevail on a statutory, regulatory, or constitutional claim. Such litigation would still face its own jurisdictional and merits requirements, but the court did not foreclose it.

The decision extends beyond immigration practice

The reasoning may influence challenges brought by lawyers in benefits, administrative, civil-rights, and other regulated fields. Its examples expressly resist a rule allowing attorneys to challenge government measures simply because those measures make existing or prospective client matters harder to handle.

No substantive approval of FOIA-only access

Most importantly, the decision does not establish that FOIA is always a legally adequate substitute for disclosure in immigration proceedings. The INA, regulatory, and due-process questions remain unanswered by this appellate opinion.

6. Complex Concepts Simplified

Article III standing

The requirement that a plaintiff have a sufficiently personal, concrete stake in a dispute before a federal court may decide it.

Injury in fact

A real, individualized harm that has occurred or is sufficiently imminent—not merely disagreement with a policy.

Traceability and redressability

Traceability asks whether the challenged conduct caused the injury. Redressability asks whether the requested court order would likely remedy it.

Organizational standing

An organization suing because it has itself been injured. Organizations must meet the ordinary standing requirements; their missions do not create an exemption.

Resource diversion

Redirecting staff time or money in response to challenged conduct. Under this opinion, that expenditure does not alone establish standing without a qualifying direct injury.

Core business activities

The services an organization actually provides, whether commercial or nonprofit. Direct interference with those services differs from making work more expensive.

Third-party standing

A litigant asserting another person’s rights when applicable legal requirements permit it. This differs from claiming an injury to the litigant’s own operations.

APA review

Judicial examination of federal agency action for compliance with governing law and administrative-law standards. A plaintiff must first establish standing.

Affirmance on different grounds

An appellate court leaves the lower court’s judgment in place but relies on another reason. Here, that reason was lack of standing, not a decision that the disclosure practices were lawful.

7. Conclusion

The First Circuit’s central holding is that lawyers and legal-service organizations cannot establish standing to challenge immigration disclosure practices merely by showing that representation has become more costly, time-consuming, or capacity-constraining. Applying the Supreme Court’s narrowed reading of organizational standing, the court required a direct injury beyond the asserted expenditures themselves.

The opinion also stresses the need to establish the particular agency policy being challenged. Its broader significance lies in limiting provider-based litigation while preserving the distinction between ordinary representation burdens and direct interference with legal services or compensation. It leaves the underlying legality of DHS’s disclosure practices unresolved.