Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights v. Mullin: A Standing Lesson for Anyone Suing Over a Memo
- Citation
- Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights v. Mullin, No. 25-5289 (D.C. Cir. Aug. 11, 2026) (per curiam), vacating the stay entered in No. 1:25-cv-00872 (D.D.C.)
- Court
- U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
- Decided
- August 11, 2026
- Statute
- 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(1)(A)(i); 8 C.F.R. § 1.2; 5 U.S.C. § 705; 28 U.S.C. § 1292(a)(1); Article III
- Holding
- Organizations challenging executive guidance in order to spare their members expedited removal lack standing where the relief sought would not leave those members any less liable to expedited removal under an unchallenged regulation. The district court lacked jurisdiction and its § 705 stay is vacated.
This is a case about redressability, and it is the most useful thing the D.C. Circuit has published this year for anyone drafting a complaint against immigration guidance. The plaintiffs attacked the documents that told officers to do something. They did not attack the regulation that let officers do it anyway. That gap cost them the case.
The two documents
On January 23, 2025, then-Acting Secretary Benjamine C. Huffman directed immigration officers to consider whether expedited removal should be applied to anyone “amenable,” expressly including people with “active parole status.” On February 18, 2025, ICE circulated an email telling officers they “may process for [expedited removal] any arriving alien,” including “paroled arriving aliens.”
The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and two other membership organizations sued under the APA and the Due Process Clause and moved under 5 U.S.C. § 705 to stay both documents. The district court granted a stay to the extent the challenged actions subjected to expedited removal anyone who had, at any time, been paroled into the United States at a point of entry.
The regulation nobody challenged
Parole is permission to enter, not an admission. 8 U.S.C. § 1182(d)(5)(A). People who have not been admitted may be removed, and the route can be ordinary removal proceedings or the expedited track. The expedited track has two doors. One is the designation authority, § 1225(b)(1)(A)(iii), which carries the two-year continuous-presence exception. The other — the one that mattered here — is what the court called the “arriving in” authority, § 1225(b)(1)(A)(i), which carries no such exception.
And since 1997, six months after the statute was enacted, the implementing regulation has said this: “An arriving alien remains an arriving alien even if paroled … and even after any such parole is terminated or revoked.” 8 C.F.R. § 1.2.
The plaintiffs did not move to stay § 1.2. They did not challenge it at all. So even with the Huffman Memorandum and the ICE email struck down, their members would have remained exactly as liable to expedited removal as before, under a regulation that had been on the books for twenty-eight years. The court put it plainly: the question was whether the organizations had standing “without showing that the requested relief would likely leave their members less liable to expedited removal.” They did not.
How the case got to the court of appeals at all
A § 705 stay is not obviously an appealable order, and the panel spent real effort on that before reaching standing. Section 1292(a)(1) reaches interlocutory orders granting or refusing injunctions, and under Carson v. American Brands, 450 U.S. 79 (1981), an order that does not say “injunction” is still appealable if it has the practical effect of one — either because it decides substantially all the merits, or because it may have serious, perhaps irreparable consequences that can be challenged effectively only by immediate appeal. See Salazar ex rel. Salazar v. District of Columbia, 671 F.3d 1258, 1261–62 (D.C. Cir. 2012).
The panel found both halves of the second branch satisfied, leaning on Trump v. CASA, Inc., 606 U.S. 831 (2025) for the proposition that universal relief against the Executive works an irreparable injury on the government, and on the foreign-affairs character of immigration policy, Trump v. Orr, 146 S. Ct. 44 (2025); Harisiades v. Shaughnessy, 342 U.S. 580, 588–89 (1952). It noted a live disagreement within the circuit about how broadly CASA reads on irreparable injury.
Significance
Read this one as a drafting checklist rather than a doctrinal development. Guidance documents are attractive targets: they are recent, they are quotable, and they are often sloppy. But a memorandum that tells officers to use an authority is not the source of the authority. If the statute and a long-standing regulation independently permit the conduct, enjoining the memorandum changes nothing that a court can measure, and the case fails at Article III before anyone reaches the merits.
The corollary for habeas practice is that an individual petition is sometimes the sturdier vehicle. A detained person challenging his own expedited-removal order does not have to show that vacating a policy would help a class of members; he has to fit within § 1252(e)(2). That is a narrow gate, but it is a gate, and it does not close on redressability grounds before it is reached.
Filed under Procedural & Doctrinal. Published August 11, 2026.