3. Analysis: Legal Reasoning and Precedents
A. The qualified-immunity framework
The court began with the familiar distinction between a constitutional violation and an official’s entitlement to protection from personal damages liability. Under Jordan v. Carter, 428 F.3d 67, 71 (1st Cir. 2005), qualified immunity can protect even unconstitutional conduct when a reasonable official, considering the circumstances and the law at the time, could have regarded the conduct as lawful.
Díaz-Bigio v. Santini, 652 F.3d 45, 50 (1st Cir. 2011), supplied the two principal questions:
- Do the facts alleged or shown establish a constitutional violation?
- Was the relevant right clearly established when the challenged conduct occurred?
The second question includes both the clarity of the governing legal rule and whether its application to the particular circumstances would have been clear to a reasonable official. Thus, a general prohibition against political discrimination does not automatically resolve immunity for every government position.
López-Quiñones v. P.R. Nat'l Guard, 526 F.3d 23, 25 (1st Cir. 2008), translated that framework into the political-patronage setting: could defendants appropriately consider political affiliation as a job qualification, and, if not, would a reasonable official have understood that a patronage dismissal was prohibited? The district court could address the second inquiry without conclusively resolving the first.
B. When political affiliation may be an employment qualification
The governing substantive framework came from Jimenez Fuentes v. Torres Gaztambide, 807 F.2d 236, 241–42 (1st Cir. 1986) (en banc). The opinion described an inquiry into whether the position involves governmental decisionmaking on matters allowing political disagreement over objectives or implementation. If it does, the analysis also examines whether the position resembles a policymaker, confidential adviser, communicator, or another office for which party affiliation is comparably appropriate.
This framework explains why identifying the positions’ responsibilities mattered. Political affiliation is not automatically an impermissible employment consideration for every public position, but neither does public employment alone make patronage dismissal lawful.
Elrod v. Burns, 427 U.S. 347 (1976), appeared in the defendants’ argument acknowledging that Colón’s position might, on the existing record, fall within constitutional protection. Its role in this opinion was foundational rather than independently dispositive: the defendants maintained that even a protected employee’s dismissal could leave officials immune if its unlawfulness was not sufficiently clear. The First Circuit did not finally classify Colón’s position under Elrod v. Burns.
C. Interlocutory jurisdiction: legal questions, not factual reweighing
The central jurisdictional precedent was Johnson v. Jones, 515 U.S. 304 (1995). It distinguishes between two types of rulings that may appear in a denial of qualified-immunity summary judgment:
- A determination that the evidence creates a genuine factual dispute for trial, which ordinarily cannot be challenged through an immediate immunity appeal.
- A legal determination about immunity on an accepted factual premise, which may be reviewed immediately.
The distinction preserves the limited character of interlocutory review. A defendant cannot obtain immediate appellate reconsideration of factual sufficiency merely by presenting the disagreement as a qualified-immunity issue.
Applying Johnson v. Jones, the court could decide whether the district court had improperly imposed a subjective investigation requirement. That challenge accepted the relevant factual premises and questioned only their legal significance.
The defendants’ other challenge required greater care. To the extent they disputed the district court’s factual premises about the employees’ responsibilities, appellate jurisdiction was absent. To the extent they accepted those premises and argued that immunity nevertheless followed as a matter of law, jurisdiction existed. The court therefore examined jurisdiction argument by argument rather than treating the entire appeal as either reviewable or unreviewable.
D. The district court incorrectly imposed a subjective investigation requirement
One district-court rationale was that factual disputes remained over whether the defendants had actually considered the plaintiffs’ duties before removing them. The district court reasoned that reasonable officials should investigate whether political affiliation is appropriate for a position before dismissing its occupant on political grounds.
The First Circuit rejected that rationale under López-Quiñones v. P.R. Nat'l Guard. The district court had relied on reasoning advanced by Judge Torruella in a separate opinion, not the controlling majority analysis. Judge Torruella considered an inquiry into the position’s requirements necessary to reasonable conduct. The majority, however, applied an objective standard: what would a reasonable official have thought?
That distinction was decisive. Whether the defendants personally investigated the positions did not determine their entitlement to qualified immunity. The court instead had to assess the positions and the applicable law objectively.
The holding is limited to the immunity inquiry. It does not approve political dismissals without investigation, nor does it make an official’s political motivation irrelevant to the underlying discrimination claim. It means that a failure to investigate is not, by itself, a substitute for the objective qualified-immunity analysis.
E. The independent factual ground remained intact
The district court had separately concluded that uncertainty about the plaintiffs’ responsibilities prevented summary judgment on objective reasonableness. It considered both official job descriptions and testimony concerning the duties performed.
The defendants therefore needed to explain why, even accepting the plaintiffs’ evidence and all permissible favorable inferences, a reasonable official could have believed that political affiliation was an appropriate qualification.
Cady v. Walsh, 753 F.3d 348, 359–60 (1st Cir. 2014), required appellants to develop precisely that argument: entitlement to judgment even after drawing the inferences the district court considered permissible. McKenney v. Mangino, 873 F.3d 75, 81 (1st Cir. 2017), reinforced the requirement that an appellant explain why immunity follows assuming the district court properly analyzed the facts.
The defendants’ assertions did not meet that standard. Saying that a reasonable official could have considered the positions unprotected, or that reasonable officials could disagree, stated a proposed conclusion without explaining how the accepted record supported it.
F. Formal job descriptions did not supply an adequately developed alternative argument
The defendants relied on language describing discretion, initiative, and public-facing responsibilities. Colón’s description, for example, included coordinating and participating in official Senate activities and exercising initiative and personal judgment.
They also invoked Galloza v. Foy, 389 F.3d 26, 31 (1st Cir. 2004), which directs attention to the attributes inherent in a position—its duties and powers—rather than merely the work performed by a particular former occupant.
That principle did not resolve the appeal. The defendants failed to explain why the position’s inherent attributes must be determined exclusively from its formal description, regardless of other evidence about its responsibilities. Quoting Galloza v. Foy did not establish that additional proposition.
Under United States v. Gonsalves, 859 F.3d 95, 112 n.7 (1st Cir. 2017), undeveloped arguments are waived. The court applied that rule to the suggested argument that the descriptions alone compelled immunity.
This is an important limit on the decision’s precedential reach. The court did not hold that an employee’s actual activities always override a formal job description. Nor did it reject the inherent-duties approach. It held that the defendants had not adequately developed the argument necessary to obtain reversal on that basis.
G. PROMESA did not extinguish these personal-capacity claims
The defendants also argued that Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy proceedings required dismissal or a permanent stay, independently of qualified immunity. They relied on the confirmation order in In re Fin. Oversight & Mgmt. Bd. of P.R., 636 B.R. 1 (D.P.R. 2022), which confirmed the Commonwealth’s Plan of Adjustment and discharged and enjoined certain claims.
A subsequent controlling decision foreclosed that argument. In In re Fin. Oversight & Mgmt. Bd. of P.R., 178 F.4th 747, 751, 759 (1st Cir. 2026), the First Circuit held that the order did not apply to personal-capacity claims. Such claims were therefore not subject to its injunction against prosecution.
That precedent distinguished claims against the Commonwealth from claims seeking to impose liability on individual officials. It explained that extinguishing the latter would constitute a nonconsensual third-party release inconsistent with the Plan’s language and the reasoning of Harrington v. Purdue Pharma L.P., 603 U.S. 204 (2024).
Harrington v. Purdue Pharma L.P. thus influenced this appeal through the intervening circuit decision. The opinion did not independently announce a comprehensive rule governing every possible PROMESA release. It applied an existing interpretation of the particular confirmation order to the personal-capacity claims before it.
H. Authorities concerning the reachability of the bankruptcy argument
The court rejected the PROMESA contention while assuming that it was properly before the court in this interlocutory appeal. Several authorities explained that procedural approach:
- Posada v. Cultural Care, Inc., 66 F.4th 348, 356 n.6 (1st Cir. 2023), quoting Cowels v. Fed. Bureau of Investigation, 936 F.3d 62, 67 (1st Cir. 2019), permits an assumption of statutory jurisdiction where that question is complex but the merits are easily resolved against the party invoking jurisdiction.
- Asociación De Subscripción Conjunta Del Seguro De Responsabilidad Obligatorio v. Flores Galarza, 484 F.3d 1, 20 n.22 (1st Cir. 2007), recognizes that appellate jurisdiction over an interlocutory immunity appeal extends to standing issues.
- Arizonans for Off. Eng. v. Arizona, 520 U.S. 43, 68 n.22 (1997), describes mootness as standing considered over time, helping explain the possible jurisdictional significance of an argument that intervening bankruptcy proceedings eliminated available relief.
These authorities supported addressing and rejecting the bankruptcy contention without resolving every question about its procedural availability. They did not eliminate the separate restrictions imposed by Johnson v. Jones on review of the qualified-immunity ruling.