Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca9-19-56417/USCOURTS-ca9-19-56417-1/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 890
Nature of Suit: Other Statutory Actions
Cause of Action: 

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FOR PUBLICATION

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT

AL OTRO LADO, a California 

corporation; ABIGAIL DOE;

BEATRICE DOE; CAROLINA DOE;

DINORA DOE; INGRID DOE; JOSE 

DOE; URSULA DOE; VICTORIA DOE;

BIANCA DOE; JUAN DOE; ROBERTO 

DOE; CESAR DOE; MARIA DOE;

EMILIANA DOE, individually and on 

behalf of all others similarly situated,

Plaintiffs-Appellees,

v.

CHAD F. WOLF, Acting Secretary, 

U.S. Department of Homeland 

Security; MARK A. MORGAN, Acting 

Commissioner of U.S. Customs and 

Border Protection; TODD C. OWEN, 

Executive Assistant Commissioner, 

Office of Field Operations, United 

States Customs and Border 

Protection, in his official capacity,

Defendants-Appellants.

No. 19-56417

D.C. No.

3:17-cv-02366-

BAS-KSC

ORDER

Filed March 5, 2020

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2 AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF

Before: Sydney R. Thomas, Chief Judge, and Marsha S. 

Berzon and Daniel A. Bress, Circuit Judges.

Order by Judge Berzon;

Dissent by Judge Bress

SUMMARY*

Immigration

The panel denied the government’s motion for a stay, 

pending appeal, of the district court’s order issuing a classwide preliminary injunction enjoining enforcement of a 

regulation that provides, subject to narrow exceptions, that a 

noncitizen who “enters, attempts to enter, or arrives in the 

United States” at the southern border on or after July 16, 

2019, is not eligible for asylum in the United States unless 

they applied for asylum in another country, such as Mexico, 

that they passed through on their way to the southern border. 

8 C.F.R. § 208.13(c)(4) (“Third Country Transit Rule” or 

“the Rule”). 

Plaintiff Al Otro Lado—an organization dedicated to 

helping individuals seek asylum in the United States—along 

with thirteen individual plaintiffs (collectively, “Al Otro 

Lado”), originally challenged in this case the government’s 

policy of turning back asylum seekers at ports of entry on the 

southern border and telling them to return later to file for 

asylum, a policy the government refers to as “metering.” 

However, the motion at issue in this order stemmed from the 

* This summary constitutes no part of the opinion of the court. It 

has been prepared by court staff for the convenience of the reader.

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AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF 3

impact of the Third Country Transit Rule on a subgroup of 

metered asylum seekers. Al Otro Lado argued that, if the 

Rule is applied to non-Mexican asylum seekers metered at 

the border before July 16, 2019, the Rule will long delay 

their ability to apply for asylum in the United States and, for 

a large proportion of the class members, could preclude them 

from accessing any asylum process altogether. 

The district court granted a preliminary injunction 

enjoining enforcement of the Rule against a provisionally 

certified class of plaintiffs who arrived at the southern border 

seeking asylum before July 16, 2019—when the Rule went 

into effect—but were denied entry and prevented from 

making an asylum claim under the metering policy, and 

continue to seek access to the U.S. asylum process. The 

district court explained that, because the Rule went into 

effect after class members were subject to metering, class 

members did not attempt to apply for asylum in Mexico, as 

required by Mexican law, within 30 days of entry. Thus, 

they unintentionally and irrevocably relinquished their right 

to claim asylum in Mexico and, due to the Rule, their right 

to claim asylum in the United States. This panel granted a 

temporary stay of the preliminary injunction on December 

20, 2019, in an order that was only intended to preserve the 

status quo until the substantive motion for a stay pending 

appeal could be considered on the merits.

The panel concluded that the administrative burdens the 

government faces in implementing the injunction—by 

identifying class members—are either not irreparable harm 

of the kind that could justify a stay pending appeal, or, 

“minimal” harm. The panel explained that the government 

offered at best weak evidence that it will suffer significant 

overall delay in processing asylum applications at the border 

during the relatively short period before the appeal is 

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resolved, and that the government could significantly 

mitigate the harm created by its own recordkeeping practices 

by obtaining copies of waitlists of metered asylum seekers, 

but has declined to do so.

Next, the panel concluded that the government had not 

carried its burden to establish a sufficient likelihood of 

success on the merits, noting that where, as here, the 

showing of irreparable harm is weak, the government had to 

make a commensurately strong showing of a likelihood of 

success on the merits to prevail. The district court concluded 

that aliens in the process of arriving, such as class 

members—who approached the border, sought entry, but 

were turned away from a port of entry—are covered by 8 

U.S.C. § 1225(b)(1)(A)(ii), which requires immigration 

officers to refer arriving migrants seeking asylum to asylum 

officers. The government argued that, because class 

members were in Mexico on the effective date of the Rule, 

they will necessarily arrive in the United States after July 16, 

2019, and the Rule by its plain terms will then apply. The 

panel observed that, for the government to succeed on this 

argument, one of two things must be true: 1) either the 

district court must be wrong that class members were 

“arriving in the United States” when they first attempted to 

enter and were turned back, or, 2) if they were “arriving,” 

the first arrival must no longer have any legal significance, 

so any second arrival—governed by the Rule—will be the 

only one that matters. The panel concluded that the district 

court’s underlying statutory analysis was sufficiently sound 

and persuasive as to both the meaning of “arriving in the 

United States” and the legal significance of an arrival.

Because the Government did not satisfy the first two 

factors, the panel concluded that it need not dwell on the 

final two factors—harm to the opposing party and the public 

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AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF 5

interest. Even so, the panel concluded that the balance of 

equities and public interest tip sharply in Al Otro Lado’s 

favor. With respect to harm to Al Otro Lado, the panel 

explained that enforcement of the Rule against the 

provisionally certified class would cause not only substantial 

but irreparable injury to them. The class relied to their 

detriment on the government’s representations, returning to 

Mexico reasonably believing that if they followed 

procedures, they would eventually have an opportunity to

make a claim for asylum in the United States. However, the 

Rule would now make them ineligible for asylum in the 

United States, and they cannot in all probability pursue 

asylum in Mexico due to the procedural limits on the 

availability of asylum in Mexico. As to the fourth factor, the 

panel noted that aspects of the public interest favor both 

sides, but concluded that, when considered alongside the 

government’s failure to show irreparable harm, the final two 

factors did not weigh in favor of a stay.

Finally, the panel emphasized that the question whether 

the injunction should be overturned—the merits of the 

ultimate appeal—was not before this motions panel; it ruled 

only on the motion to stay the injunction pending appeal. 

The panel concluded that respecting the role of stay motions 

required that the panel decline to usurp the role of the 

preliminary injunction merits panel, explaining that 

premature determination of complex legal and factual issues 

will not in the long run produce well-considered and 

dependable judicial decision-making. The panel also noted 

that the appeal of the preliminary injunction has been 

expedited, and that this case will be assigned to the next 

available oral argument panel for a decision on the merits.

Dissenting, Judge Bress wrote that he would have 

granted the stay, noting at the outset that the district court 

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6 AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF

enjoined a rule that the Supreme Court just months ago 

ordered could go into effect pending appeal. Considering 

the likelihood of success on the merits, Judge Bress first 

concluded that there was no basis for the district court to 

enjoin the Rule in this metering case—where the issue is 

whether metering is lawful—and that the district court 

greatly exceeded its powers. In this respect, Judge Bress 

noted that courts do not have authority to issue an injunction 

on claims not pled in the complaint, and that the All Writs 

Act is not a grant of plenary power to the courts. Even 

assuming that the focus of the merits analysis should be on 

the Rule, Judge Bress wrote that the government had shown 

a strong likelihood of success on its claim that the Rule does 

apply to the plaintiff subclass. In this respect, Judge Bress 

wrote that the district court erred in concluding that plaintiffs 

had arrived in the United States when they were metered 

such that the asylum laws applied to them at that time. Judge 

Bress also wrote that the majority’s endorsement of the 

district court’s ruling on that point, coupled with the 

majority’s related holding that the immigration laws are 

frozen at the time of metering, works a revolution in 

immigration law. 

Further, Judge Bress concluded that the factor of 

irreparable harm also weighs strongly in favor of the 

government, explaining the harm is the government’s 

inability to apply the Rule to persons that the Rule covers, 

where the Supreme Court has already held that this Rule may 

be implemented pending appeal. Judge Bress also disagreed 

with the majority’s assessment that the harm here is selfinflicted and disagreed with the majority that the government 

can easily comply with the injunction by relying on waitlists. 

In light of the immigration crisis at the border, Judge Bress 

concluded that the government had demonstrated that 

complying with the injunction will create irreparable harm. 

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AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF 7

Finally, Judge Bress concluded that, for the same reasons set 

out in his prior analysis, the final stay factors also favored 

the government.

COUNSEL

Scott G. Stewart (argued), Deputy Assistant Attorney 

General; Alexander J. Halaska, Trial Attorney; Katherine J. 

Shinners, Senior Litigation Counsel; Erez Reuveni, 

Assistant Director; William C. Peachey, Director, District 

Court Section; Joseph H. Hunt, Assistant Attorney General; 

Civil Division, United States Department of Justice, 

Washington, D.C.; for Defendants-Appellants.

Ori Lev (argued), Stephen M. Medlock, and Eric Brooks, 

Mayer Brown LLP, Washington, D.C.; Melissa E. Crow 

(argued), Southern Povery Law Center, Washington, D.C.; 

Baher Azmy and Angelo Guisado, Center for Constitutional 

Rights, New York, New York; Matthew H. Marmolejo, 

Mayer Brown LLP, Los Angeles, California; Sarah Rich and 

Rebecca Cassler, Southern Poverty Law Center, Decatur, 

Georgia; Karolina Walters, American Immigration Council, 

Washington, D.C.; for Plaintiffs-Appellees.

Xavier Becerra, Attorney General; Michael L. Newman, 

Senior Assistant Attorney General; Susan Slager, 

Supervising Deputy Attorney General; Vilma Palma-Solana, 

James F. Zahradka II, R. Erandi Zamora-Graziano, and 

Marissa Malouff, Deputy Attorneys General; Office of the 

Attorney General, Los Angeles, California; William Tong, 

Attorney General, Hartford, Connecticut; Kathleen 

Jennings, Attorney General, Wilmington, Delaware; Clare

E. Connors, Attorney General, Honolulu, Hawaii; Kwame 

Raoul, Attorney General, Chicago, Illinois; Aaron M. Frey, 

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8 AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF

Attorney General, Augusta, Maine; Brian E. Frosh, Attorney 

General, Baltimore, Maryland; Mauar Healey, Attorney 

General, Boston, Massachusetts; Dana Nessel, Attorney 

General, Lansing, Michigan; Keith Ellison, Attorney 

General, St. Paul, Minnesota; Aaron D. Ford, Attorney 

General, Carson City, Nevada; Gurbir S. Grewal, Trenton, 

New Jersey; Hector Balderas, Attorney General, Santa Fe, 

New Mexico; Letitia James, Attorney General, New York, 

New York; Ellen F. Rosenblum, Attorney General, Salem, 

Oregon; Josh Shapiro, Attorney General, Harrisburg, 

Pennsylvania; Peter F. Neronha, Attorney General,

Providence, Rhode Island; Thomas J. Donovan Jr., Attorney 

General, Montpelier, Vermont; Mark R. Herring, Attorney 

General, Richmond, Virginia; Robert W. Ferguson, 

Attorney General, Olympia, Washington; Karl A. Racine, 

Attorney General, Washington, D.C.; for Amici Curiae 

California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, 

Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, 

New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, 

Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, 

Washington, and the District of Columbia.

Susan Baker Manning, Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP, 

Washington, D.C.; Sabin Willett, Morgan Lewis & Bockius 

LLP, Boston, Massachusetts; for Amici Curiae Immigration 

Law Professors.

Dimitri D. Portnoi, O’Melveny & Myers LLP, Los Angeles, 

California, for Amici Curiae Law Professors.

Harrison J. Frahn, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP, Palo 

Alto, California, for Amici Curiae Eighteen Organizations 

Representing Asylum Seekers.

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AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF 9

ORDER

BERZON, Circuit Judge:

Plaintiff Al Otro Lado is an organization dedicated to 

helping individuals seek asylum in the United States. Along 

with thirteen Individual Plaintiffs (collectively, “Al Otro 

Lado”), Al Otro Lado originally challenged in this case the 

government’s policy of turning back asylum seekers at ports 

of entry on the southern border and telling them to return 

later to file for asylum, a policy the government refers to as 

“metering.” Al Otro Lado’s complaint alleges that asylum 

seekers are turned back to deter and discourage individuals 

from seeking access to the asylum process, and not, as the 

government maintains, because each port of entry lacks 

capacity to process additional asylum seekers.

The current motion does not directly concern the validity 

of the policy requiring asylum seekers to wait at or near the 

border for some time before their asylum applications can be 

filed and processed. Rather, this motion stems from the 

impact of a separate regulation, promulgated while this 

litigation was pending, on a subgroup of metered asylum 

seekers. That regulation, known variously as the “Third 

Country Transit Rule,” “transit rule,” and “asylum ban,” 

(“the Rule”), provides, subject to narrow exceptions, that a 

noncitizen who “enters, attempts to enter, or arrives in the 

United States” at the southern border on or after July 16, 

2019 is not eligible for asylum in the United States unless 

they applied for asylum in another country, such as Mexico, 

that they passed through on their way to the southern border. 

8 C.F.R. § 208.13(c)(4).

The district court granted a preliminary injunction 

enjoining enforcement of the Rule against a provisionally 

certified class of plaintiffs who arrived at the southern border 

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10 AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF

seeking asylum before July 16, 2019 but were denied entry 

and prevented from making an asylum claim under the 

metering policy. The government appealed and moved this 

court for a stay of the injunction pending appeal. Because the 

government has not carried its burden of showing that a stay 

is warranted, we deny the motion.

I.

Al Otro Lado’s putative class action complaint alleges 

that Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) uses various 

unlawful tactics systematically to deny asylum seekers 

access to the asylum process at Ports of Entry (“POEs”) on 

the southern border. The complaint challenges the

Government’s so-called “Turnback Policy,” which includes 

a “metering” or “waitlist” system. Under that system, the 

complaint alleges, asylum seekers who arrive at or near the 

southern border of the United States are instructed “to wait 

on the bridge, in the pre-inspection area, or at a shelter,” or 

are simply told that “they [could not] be processed because 

the POE is ‘full’ or ‘at capacity.’” According to the 

complaint and Al Otro Lado’s expert, under the 

government’s current metering practices, “[w]hen a

pedestrian approaches the U.S.-Mexico dividing line” 

without valid entry documents, CBP officers standing on the 

international line “often physically block their passage into 

U.S. territory by standing in the center of the pedestrian 

walkway.”

Al Otro Lado introduced declarations in which asylum 

seekers from a diverse set of countries and circumstances 

reported that they were turned away from the border under 

this metering policy and told to wait for an opportunity to 

submit their applications for asylum. Members of the 

provisionally certified class include Roberto Doe, who fled 

Nicaragua after the police threatened to kill him and burn 

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AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF 11

down his business for participating in a strike against the 

government; M.G., a Cuban citizen seeking asylum because 

he was threatened and punched in the mouth by a political 

official for calling his government corrupt; and Jordan Doe, 

who fled Cameroon after his father was burned to death and 

he was imprisoned and tortured by military officers who 

accused him of being a separatist. They and the 

approximately 26,000 other members of the provisionally 

certified class approached the border to present themselves 

before July 16, 2019 because they “wanted to do things the 

right way,” but were turned away.

The government does not now keep records of the people 

CPB officers turn back.1 But other groups, with the United 

States government’s knowledge and cooperation, have 

created waitlists. The district court determined that 

“[d]efendants do not . . . challenge[] that Grupo Beta, a 

service run by the Mexican Government’s National Institute 

of Migration, maintains a formalized list of asylum-seekers, 

communicates with CBP regarding POE capacity, and 

transports asylum-seekers from the top of the list to CBP.” 

The record also shows that non-profit groups, shelters, and 

small groups of asylum seekers maintain informal waitlists 

in different locations. At each POE, CBP asks the list-keeper 

in the area for a certain number of people each day based on 

the POE’s alleged capacity, and the group then calls the 

appropriate number of people from the top of its list. The 

district court concluded that “CBP relied on these lists to 

1 Under the initial metering practices instituted around the end of 

2016, CBP officials at one POE were instructed “to provide the alien 

with a piece of paper identifying a date and time for an appointment” “if 

possible.” Although there were several documented instances of 

migrants being turned back at that time, “[n]one of the asylum seekers 

turned back from these ports of entry were provided with appointments.”

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12 AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF

facilitate the process of metering,” and the record supports 

that conclusion.

On July 16, 2019, the Department of Homeland Security 

and the Department of Justice issued a joint interim final rule 

entitled “Asylum Eligibility and Procedural Modifications.” 

84 Fed. Reg. 33,829 (July 16, 2019), codified at 8 C.F.R. 

§ 208.13(c)(4). In relevant part, the Rule provides:

(c) Mandatory denials—

(4) Additional limitation on eligibility for 

asylum. Notwithstanding the provisions 

of § 208.15, any alien who enters, 

attempts to enter, or arrives in the United 

States across the southern land border on 

or after July 16, 2019, after transiting 

through at least one country outside the 

alien’s country of citizenship, nationality, 

or last lawful habitual residence en route 

to the United States, shall be found 

ineligible for asylum unless: 

(i) The alien demonstrates that he or 

she applied for protection from 

persecution or torture in at least one 

country outside the alien’s country of 

citizenship, nationality, or last lawful 

habitual residence through which the 

alien transited en route to the United 

States, and the alien received a final 

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AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF 13

judgment denying the alien protection 

in such country.

8 C.F.R. § 208.13(c)(4).2

Al Otro Lado moved for a preliminary injunction to 

prevent enforcement of the Rule against provisional class 

members. It argued that if the Rule is applied to nonMexican asylum seekers metered at the border before July 

16, 2019, the Rule will long delay their ability to apply for 

asylum in the United States and, for a large proportion of the 

class members, could preclude them from accessing any 

asylum process altogether. This assertion has support in the 

record. As the district court recognized, “Mexico’s 

Commission to Assist Refugees, the administrative agency 

responsible for processing asylum claims, requires that 

applicants for asylum submit their petitions within 30 days 

2 In separate litigation challenging the validity of the Rule, the 

Supreme Court on September 11, 2019 stayed a district court’s 

preliminary injunction precluding application of the Rule “pending 

disposition of the Government’s appeal in the United States Court of 

Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and disposition of the Government’s 

petition for a writ of certiorari, if such a writ is sought.” Barr v. E. Bay 

Sanctuary Covenant, 140 S. Ct. 3 (2019) (mem.). This court heard

argument on December 2, 2019 on the government’s appeal of the 

injunction; the case is presently pending in this court. E. Bay Sanctuary 

Covenant v. Barr, No. 19-16487. We note that the outcome of the East 

Bay appeal could affect whether the issue before us remains a live 

dispute.

Contrary to the Dissent’s suggestion, see Dissent at 51–54, the 

district court’s injunction in this case is not precluded by the Supreme 

Court’s stay of the injunction pending appeal in East Bay. That stay 

order, like any other, is not a definitive resolution of the merits, and it 

involved the substantive validity of the Rule, not application of the Rule, 

if substantively valid, to the provisionally certified class in the particular 

circumstances of this case.

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14 AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF

of entering Mexico.” The district court then summarized the 

bleak result for plaintiffs:

[B]ecause the [Rule] was not promulgated 

until after the time these individuals were 

subject to metering, none of the members of 

the putative class attempted to exhaust 

Mexico’s asylum procedures within the 30-

day window. In short, should the [Rule] apply 

to these individuals, the situation would 

effectively be this: Based on representations 

of the Government they need only “wait in 

line” to access the asylum process in the 

United States, the members of the putative 

class may have not filed an asylum petition in 

Mexico within 30 days of entry, thus 

unintentionally and irrevocably relinquishing 

their right to claim asylum in Mexico and, 

due to the [Rule], their right to claim asylum 

in the United States.3

Although it is possible to seek a waiver of Mexico’s 30-day 

bar, Al Otro Lado maintains that “it is nearly impossible to 

do so without legal counsel,” which most asylum seekers 

cannot afford. Additionally, even if a waiver is granted, 

according to evidence submitted by Al Otro Lado, it often 

3 Al Otro Lado asserts that “nearly all provisional class members are 

barred from even applying for asylum in Mexico.” The government 

argued in the district court that class members could present evidence of 

Mexico’s rejection of their asylum application, but made no 

representation that such a rejection would in its view satisfy the Rule,

which requires a “final judgment” denying protection in another country. 

8 C.F.R. § 2018.13(c)(4)(i). We do not decide whether Mexico’s 

rejection of an asylum application under its 30-day bar would be a “final 

judgment” satisfying the Rule.

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AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF 15

takes two years for a Mexican asylum claim to be fully 

adjudicated.

On November 19, 2019, the district court provisionally 

certified for purposes of a preliminary injunction a class 

consisting of “all non-Mexican asylum-seekers who were 

unable to make a direct asylum claim at a U.S. POE before 

July 16, 2019 because of the Government’s metering policy, 

and who continue to seek access to the U.S. asylum 

process.”4 It granted a preliminary injunction, ordering that 

“Defendants are hereby enjoined from applying the Asylum 

Ban to members of the aforementioned provisionally 

certified class and ordered to return to the pre-Asylum Ban 

practices for processing the asylum applications of members 

of the certified class.”

On December 4, 2019, the government appealed the 

order granting the injunction, and asked the district court to 

stay the preliminary injunction pending appeal. The 

government simultaneously moved to expedite briefing on 

its stay motion. The district court denied the motion to 

expedite briefing and set a hearing on the briefing schedule 

for the stay motion for January 3, 2020, so the motion would 

not be decided before then.

Rather than wait for the district court’s ruling on the stay 

motion, the government moved this court for a stay pending 

appeal on December 12, 2019, three weeks after the 

4 The government does not challenge the district court’s provisional 

certification of the class for purposes of the preliminary injunction. We 

have approved provisional class certification for purposes of preliminary 

injunction proceedings. See Meyer v. Portfolio Recovery Assocs., LLC, 

707 F.3d 1036, 1041–43 (9th Cir. 2012) (affirming provisional class 

certification for purposes of a preliminary injunction).

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16 AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF

injunction issued.5 This panel granted a temporary stay on 

December 20, 2019, in an order that was “only intended to 

preserve the status quo until the substantive motion for a stay 

pending appeal can be considered on the merits.” The panel 

specified that the temporary stay “does not constitute in any 

way a decision as to the merits of the motion for stay pending 

appeal.”

The appeal of the preliminary injunction has been 

expedited. The briefing was completed on February 20, 

2020. The case will be assigned to the next available oral 

argument panel for a decision on the merits of the appeal.

II.

“A stay is not a matter of right, even if irreparable injury 

might otherwise result.” Virginian Ry. Co. v. United States, 

272 U.S. 658, 672 (1926). “It is instead ‘an exercise of 

judicial discretion,’ and ‘the propriety of its issue is 

dependent upon the circumstances of the particular case.’”6

5 A party may move this court for a stay pending appeal if it first 

sought a stay in the district court, and the court “denied the motion or 

failed to afford the relief requested.” Fed. R. App. P. 8(a)(2)(A)(ii). We 

entertain the stay motion here even though the district court has not yet 

ruled on it, because the delay in the district court was sufficiently long to 

fall under Rule 8(a)(2)(A)(ii).

6 The Dissent questions the district court’s authority to grant the 

injunction in this case because the Rule is not challenged in Al Otro 

Lado’s operative complaint. See Dissent at 50–55. But it then 

acknowledges the answer. Id. at 54. Having concluded that it would 

interfere with the court’s jurisdiction for the Rule to extinguish some 

provisional class members’ asylum claims while they sought access to 

the asylum process through their metering challenge (even if other 

metered asylum seekers’ claims would survive), the district court 

properly issued an injunction under the All Writs Act. See 28 U.S.C. 

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AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF 17

Nken v. Holder, 556 U.S. 418, 433 (2009) (quoting Virginian 

Ry. Co., 272 U. S. at 672–73) (alteration adopted). “The 

party requesting a stay bears the burden of showing that the 

circumstances justify an exercise of that discretion.” Id. 

at 433–34.

In deciding a motion to stay an order pending appeal, we 

consider: “(1) whether the stay applicant has made a strong 

showing that he is likely to succeed on the merits; 

(2) whether the applicant will be irreparably injured absent a 

stay; (3) whether issuance of the stay will substantially injure 

the other parties interested in the proceeding; and (4) where 

the public interest lies.” Nken, 556 U.S. at 434 (citation 

omitted). “The first two factors . . . are the most critical”; the 

last two are reached only “[o]nce an applicant satisfies the 

first two factors.” Id. at 434–35.

Under the “sliding scale” approach we use, “the elements 

of the preliminary injunction test are balanced, so that a 

stronger showing of one element may offset a weaker 

§ 1651(a) (injunction may issue when “necessary or appropriate in aid of 

[the court’s] jurisdiction”); FTC v. Dean Foods Co., 384 U.S. 597, 604 

(1966) (a court has “express authority under the All Writs Act to issue 

such temporary injunctions as may be necessary to protect its own 

jurisdiction”); Michael v. INS, 48 F.3d 657, 659 (2d Cir. 1995) (All Writs 

Act injunction of a prisoner’s deportation proper to preserve the court’s 

jurisdiction over the pending appeal). The district court also properly 

concluded that the operative complaint alleged an “unlawful, widespread 

pattern and practice of denying asylum seekers access to the asylum 

process.” Because the injunction sought to preserve class members’ 

access to the asylum process, there was a sufficient “relationship 

between the injury claimed in the motion for injunctive relief and the 

conduct asserted in the underlying complaint,” Pac. Radiation Oncology, 

LLC v. Queen’s Med. Ctr., 810 F.3d 631, 636 (9th Cir. 2015), that a 

preliminary injunction was a proper exercise of the court’s equitable 

powers.

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18 AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF

showing of another.” Alliance for the Wild Rockies v. 

Cottrell, 632 F.3d 1127, 1131 (9th Cir. 2011). The same 

sliding scale approach applies to the consideration of stays 

pending appeal. Leiva-Perez v. Holder, 640 F.3d 962, 966 

(9th Cir. 2011) (per curiam). “If anything, a flexible 

approach is even more appropriate in the stay context.” Id.

We first consider the government’s showing on 

irreparable harm, then discuss the likelihood of success on 

the merits under the sliding scale approach, and finally, 

address the third and fourth elements together.

A.

An applicant for a stay pending appeal must show that a 

stay is necessary to avoid likely irreparable injury to the 

applicant while the appeal is pending. Nken, 556 U.S. at 434. 

“[S]imply showing some possibility of irreparable injury” is 

insufficient. Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). The 

minimum threshold showing for a stay pending appeal 

requires that irreparable injury is likely to occur during the 

period before the appeal is likely to be decided. Leiva-Perez 

v. Holder, 640 F.3d at 968. Thus, under the sliding scale 

approach, a stay applicant’s “burden with regard to 

irreparable harm is higher than it is on the likelihood of 

success prong, as she must show that an irreparable injury is 

the more probable or likely outcome.” Id.

The government has made a weak showing that it will 

suffer harm over the requisite interim period. See Nken, 

556 U.S. at 434. The injunction was in place for over three 

weeks before the government sought a stay pending appeal. 

It thus had available to it the best evidence of harms likely 

to occur because of the injunction: evidence of harms that 

did occur because of the injunction. Rather than submitting 

evidence of actual burdens and delays it has experienced 

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AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF 19

since the injunction issued, the government’s declarations 

contain only estimates, assumptions, and projections.

The government estimates that identifying class 

members—that is, noncitizens who arrived at the border 

before July 16, 2019 and whose entry into the United States 

was refused by immigration officials—will burden the 

efficiency of the asylum interview process overall. It 

submitted a declaration by the Deputy Chief of the Asylum 

Division, Ashley Caudill-Mirillo, which projects that 

because DHS itself does not maintain lists of noncitizens 

who were metered, the only way to identify class members 

is for USCIS “to spend an additional estimated 15 to 

30 minutes per person asking as many as 30 additional 

questions during each credible fear screening interview.” 

The government asserts that the cumulative effect of an 

additional fifteen to thirty minutes per interview “would 

have a significant negative impact on credible fear 

processing times overall.” The government does not 

represent that in any actual interview 15 to 30 minutes or 

30 additional questions were devoted to whether the 

individual asylum applicant sought entry at a POE before 

July 16, 2019. Nor does it indicate what the “30 additional 

questions” might be.

We are dubious that taking the time necessary to make 

fairly simple factual determinations for a few months 

constitutes the sort of irreparable harm that can support the 

grant of a stay pending appeal. “The key word in this 

consideration is irreparable. Mere injuries, however 

substantial, in terms of money, time and energy necessarily 

expended . . . are not enough.” Sampson v. Murray, 415 U.S. 

61, 90 (1974) (quoting Virginia Petroleum Jobbers Ass’n v. 

Fed. Power Comm’n, 259 F.2d 921, 925 (D.C. Cir. 1958)). 

Applying this principle, we recently held that “diversion of 

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20 AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF

the [government] agencies’ time, resources, and personnel 

from other pressing immigration adjudication and 

enforcement priorities” due to the need to ask additional 

questions and possibly review documentary evidence at 

bond hearings was “minimal” evidence of harm to the 

government. Hernandez v. Sessions, 872 F.3d 976, 995 (9th 

Cir. 2017) (alterations adopted). The diversion of resources 

projected here is no more persuasive as significant 

irreparable harm than it was in Hernandez.

Even assuming that short term additional administrative 

delays can in some circumstances constitute irreparable 

harm, the record here does not show cognizable irreparable 

harm to the government over the relatively short period 

before the appeal of the preliminary injunction is resolved.7

Any harm suffered is largely the result of the government’s 

own failure to keep records of asylum seekers who have been 

metered or to provide the asylum seekers with 

documentation of their attempt to seek asylum. See n.1, 

supra. That the government’s asserted harm is largely selfinflicted “severely undermines” its claim for equitable relief. 

See Hirschfeld v. Bd. of Elections in City of New York, 

984 F.2d 35, 39 (2d Cir. 1993). “[S]elf-inflicted wounds are 

not irreparable injury.” Second City Music, Inc. v. City of 

Chicago, 333 F.3d 846, 850 (7th Cir. 2003); Caplan v. 

Fellheimer Eichen Braverman & Kaskey, 68 F.3d 828, 839 

(3d Cir. 1995).

7 We deny Al Otro Lado’s motion to strike the Caudill-Mirillo and 

other declarations, Dkt. 23. Even including the challenged declarations, 

the government either does not show irreparable harm or makes a 

marginal showing, insufficient in light of the failure to make a 

particularly strong showing of likelihood of success on the merits. See

section I.B., infra.

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Al Otro Lado’s second amended complaint challenging 

the government’s metering policy was filed in November 

2018, nine months before the Rule was issued in July 2019. 

The complaint alleged that the applicants arriving at the 

border seeking to enter the POEs to file asylum applications 

had a statutory right to do so. The government called in

asylum seekers from the waitlists maintained by the Mexican 

government and others. In doing so, the government 

recognized—as its terms for the process, “metering” and 

“queue management,” imply—the practical need to identify 

which applicants had appeared at the border and in what 

order rather than choosing each day from amassed crowds 

which individuals to permit to file asylum applications. But 

the government chose to implement the metering policy in a 

way that, it maintains, could now cause administrative 

burdens, because the government did not itself create or 

administer the waitlists and so cannot rely on them 

definitively to identify class members. That deficiency was 

problematic even before the new Rule, and was avoidable 

and so self-inflicted. Any delay caused is therefore not 

irreparable harm that supports equitable relief.

In any event, the government’s guesses concerning the 

likely burden of ascertaining class membership lack support 

in the record for several reasons. For one thing, the 

government could use the waitlists maintained by the 

Mexican government and others—waitlists it relied on to 

facilitate the metering policy—as a starting point in 

determining whether a noncitizen is part of the provisional 

class, even if the lists are “underinclusive.” See Dissent 

at 85–87. Yet the government has declined to request copies 

of the waitlists or to use them. Those lists are, Al Otro Lado 

acknowledges, not entirely reliable. But the record 

establishes that the government has been using them in 

determining the order in which applicants for asylum are 

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22 AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF

allowed to enter, submit their asylum applications, and 

undergo credible fear interviews. No reason appears why the 

lists are adequate for those purposes but must be entirely 

disregarded in identifying who came to the border when for 

purposes of complying with the district court’s injunction.

Further, even apart from the availability of existing lists, 

the additional time it is likely to take during interviews to 

identify class members is almost surely considerably less 

than the government supposes. The government provides no 

basis, other than the supposition of some officials, for its 

estimation that such interviews will take an additional fifteen 

to thirty minutes and require as many as 30 additional 

questions. Only Al Otro Lado submitted records from an 

actual credible fear interview that occurred while the 

injunction was in place. During that interview, USCIS 

determined that applicant was not a member of the 

provisional class by asking two questions.8 More time may 

be needed to establish that someone who claims to be a 

member of the class actually is. But it is far from clear the 

degree to which that is so, and the total number of interviews 

likely to be affected before the appeal is decided is 

circumscribed.

The injunction is also unlikely to cause major additional 

delays because, once class members make it to the front of 

the line, they must be interviewed by an asylum officer 

8 Q: “What day did you cross the border from Mexico into the US?”

A: “10/27/2019.”

Q: “Did you ever seek to enter the United States before that time? 

When?”

A: “No sir.”.

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AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF 23

regardless of whether the Rule is applied. The Rule affects 

only an applicant’s eligibility for asylum. See 8 C.F.R. 

§ 208.13(c)(4). Because class members fear persecution, 

they may still apply for withholding of removal or relief 

under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”). 8 U.S.C. 

§ 1231(b)(3)(A); 8 C.F.R. § 208.16(c); see also 8 C.F.R. 

§ 208.30 (if the applicant is ineligible for asylum under the 

Rule, asylum officers must still refer the case to an IJ for 

consideration of withholding and CAT relief “if the alien 

establishes, respectively, a reasonable fear of persecution or 

torture”). The standards differ for asylum, withholding, and 

CAT relief, but they involve largely the same set of facts.9

Finally, the government offers only speculation that 

plaintiffs will cause further delays by requesting to 

reschedule their interviews. It offers no support for the 

statement in Caudill-Mirillo’s declaration that “individuals 

are likely to seek to reschedule their credible fear interviews 

to obtain documentary evidence or to consult with an 

attorney to draft a declaration to submit in support of their 

assertion that they . . . are a member of the provisional 

class.” As class members could gather this evidence in 

advance while they wait in Mexico if informed by public 

announcements of the need for such evidence, this delay is 

avoidable.

9 Because class members who have already had credible fear 

interviews should have been considered for withholding even if the Rule 

was applied to them, the government is unlikely to face an outsized 

additional burden in determining whether they are eligible for asylum 

with the preliminary injunction in place. These class members may still 

be in the process of having their claims reviewed, as an asylum officer’s 

negative fear determination is reviewable by an IJ, 8 C.F.R. 

§ 1208.30(g), and the IJ’s determination is reviewable by the Ninth 

Circuit. Andrade-Garcia v. Lynch, 828 F.3d 829, 833 (9th Cir. 2016).

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24 AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF

In sum, the government offered at best weak evidence 

that it will suffer significant overall delay in processing 

asylum applications at the border during the short period of 

time at issue. The government could significantly mitigate 

the harm created by its own recordkeeping practices by 

obtaining copies of the waitlists but has declined to do so. 

Thus, any administrative burdens the government faces in 

implementing the injunction are either not irreparable harm 

of the kind that could justify a stay pending appeal, or, 

“minimal” harm as in Hernandez. See 872 F.3d at 995. That 

the government’s irreparable harm showing is at best 

marginal affects the level of likelihood of success on the 

merits it must demonstrate, as we next discuss.

B.

Whether the government has failed to show any 

irreparable harm during the pendency of the appeal or has 

made only a minimal showing, it has not carried its burden 

to establish a sufficient likelihood of success on the merits.

An applicant for a stay pending appeal must make “a 

strong showing that he is likely to succeed on the merits.” 

Nken, 556 U.S. at 434. Where, as here, the showing of 

irreparable harm is weak at best, the government must make 

a commensurately strong showing of a likelihood of success 

on the merits to prevail under the sliding scale approach. 

Only “a stronger showing of one element may offset a 

weaker showing of another.” Wild Rockies, 632 F.3d 

at 1131; Leiva-Perez, 640 F.3d at 966 (applying sliding scale 

approach in the stay context).

The issue on appeal concerns the following statutory 

framework. Section 1158 creates a right to apply for asylum: 

“Any alien who is physically present in the Unites States or 

who arrives in the United States . . . irrespective of such 

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AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF 25

alien’s status, may apply for asylum in accordance with this 

section or, where applicable, section 1225(b) of this title.” 

8 U.S.C. § 1158(a)(1). Section 1225 imposes two key 

mandatory duties on immigration officers with respect to 

potential asylum seekers. First, immigration officers have a 

duty to inspect: “All aliens . . . who are applicants for 

admission or otherwise seeking admission or readmission to 

or transit through the United States shall be inspected by 

immigration officers.” 8 U.S.C. § 1225(a)(3) (emphasis 

added). Second, immigration officers have a duty to refer 

arriving migrants seeking asylum to asylum officers for 

assessment of their asylum applications:

If an immigration officer determines that an 

alien . . . who is arriving in the United States

. . . is inadmissible under section 

1182(a)(6)(C) or 1182(a)(7) of this title and 

the alien indicates either an intention to apply 

for asylum under section 1158 of this title or 

a fear of persecution, the officer shall refer 

the alien for an interview by an asylum 

officer under subparagraph (B).

8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(1)(A)(ii) (emphasis added).

In its order denying the government’s motion to dismiss 

the metering complaint, the district court observed that 

“arriv[ing] in the United States” triggers a noncitizen’s right 

to be inspected, apply for asylum, and be referred to an 

asylum officer. Al Otro Lado v. McAleenan, 394 F. Supp. 3d 

1168, 1199–1205 (S.D. Cal. 2019). The district court 

concluded that “aliens in the process of arriving,” such as 

class members—who approached the border, sought entry, 

but were turned away from a POE—are covered by the 

statutory asylum referral obligation. Id.

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In its order granting a preliminary injunction, the district 

court incorporated its earlier legal ruling regarding the reach 

of the asylum referral obligation in section 1225. On that 

basis, the court held that the provisional class of plaintiffs 

did “arrive in the United States” before the effective date of 

the Rule, so the Rule does not apply to the adjudication of 

rights triggered by that arrival. The district court reached this 

conclusion without deciding the legality of the government’s 

metering policy, which causes a delay between class 

members’ arrival and the submission and determination of 

their asylum claim. Even if the asylum claim is processed 

after July 16, 2019, the court concluded, its consideration is 

governed by the law at the time the class member was 

originally “arriving in the United States.”

The government argues that because class members were 

in Mexico on the effective date of the Rule, they will 

necessarily arrive in the United States after July 16, 2019, 

and the Rule by its plain terms will then apply. For the 

government to succeed on this argument, one of two things 

must be true: either the district court must be wrong that 

class members were “arriving in the United States” when 

they first attempted to enter and were turned back, or, if they 

were “arriving,” the first arrival must no longer have any 

legal significance, so any second arrival—governed by the 

Rule—will be the only one that matters.

The government has not made a strong showing—let 

alone the especially strong showing required here in light of 

the weak irreparable harm demonstration—that it is likely to 

succeed on either available theory. The district court’s 

underlying statutory analysis is sufficiently sound and 

persuasive as to both the meaning of “arriving in the United 

States” and the legal significance of an arrival.

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AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF 27

First, the district court’s interpretation of “arrives in the 

United States” is likely correct. As the court observed, 

“[u]nder Section 1158(a)(1)’s plain language, two classes of 

aliens may apply for asylum: (1) any alien ‘who is physically 

present in the United States’ and (2) any alien ‘who arrives 

in the United States.’” 394 F. Supp. 3d at 1199. “Applying 

the rule against surplusage,” the court reasoned, we “must 

presume that the phrases ‘mean different things.’” Id. 

(quoting Duncan v. Walker, 533 U.S. 167, 174 (2001)). The 

district court also applied the Dictionary Act’s provision that 

“[i]n determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, 

unless the context indicates otherwise—words used in the 

present tense include the future as well as the present.” Id. 

at 1200 (quoting 1 U.S.C. § 1). The court went on to reason 

that “accounting for the rule against surplusage, application 

of the Dictionary Act readily leads to the conclusion that 

Section 1158(a)(1)’s use of the present tense of ‘arrives’ 

plainly covers an alien who may not yet be in the United 

States, but who is in the process of arriving in the United 

States through a POE.” Id.

This conclusion is reinforced, the district court observed, 

by the language of section 1225(b), the provision referenced 

in section 1158(a)(1). See id. Section 1225(b) requires an 

immigration officer to refer for an asylum interview any 

inadmissible noncitizen “who is arriving in the United 

States” and expresses a fear of persecution or the intention 

to apply for asylum. 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(1)(A)(ii) (emphasis 

added). The district court recognized that “[t]he use of the 

present progressive, like use of the present participle, 

denotes an ongoing process.” 394 F. Supp. 3d at 1200 (citing 

United States v. Balint, 201 F.3d 928, 933 (7th Cir. 2000)).

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28 AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF

The district court also noted that the legislative history is 

consistent with its interpretation of “arrives in” as denoting 

an ongoing process.

Representative Lamar Smith, Chairman of 

the House Judiciary Committee’s 

Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims 

. . . observed that the term “was selected 

specifically by Congress in order to provide a 

flexible concept that would include all aliens 

who are in the process of physical entry past 

our borders[.] . . . ‘Arrival’ in this context 

should not be considered ephemeral or 

instantaneous but, consistent with common 

usage, as a process. An alien apprehended at 

any stage of this process, whether attempting 

to enter, at the point of entry, or just having 

made entry, should be considered an ‘arriving 

alien’ for the various purposes in which that 

term is used in the newly revised provisions 

of the INA.”

394 F. Supp. 3d at 1201 (quoting Implementation of Title III 

of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant 

Responsibility Act of 1996: Hearing Before the Subcomm. 

on Immigration and Claims of the H. Comm. on the 

Judiciary, 105th Cong. 17–18 (1997)).10

10 The Dissent asserts that because Representative Smith, in 

language elided from the district court’s block quotation and ours, 

described a person who “penetrated several hundred yards or even 

further into United States territory” as an example of an “arriving alien,” 

the term must include only aliens within the United States. See Dissent 

at 68–69. But this reading is inconsistent with the comments themselves, 

which expressly recognize several “stage[s] of [the arriving] process,”

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AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF 29

Historical changes to the statutory language further 

support the distinction between “physically present in” and 

“arrives in” the United States in section 1158. The Refugee 

Act of 1980 originally provided that any alien who is 

“physically present in the United States or at a land border

or port of entry, irrespective of such alien’s status,” could 

apply for asylum. See 8 U.S.C. § 1158(a) (1980) (emphasis 

added). In 1996, Congress replaced “at a land border or port 

of entry” with “who arrives in the United States (whether or 

not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who 

is brought to the United States after having been interdicted 

in international or United States waters).” 8 U.S.C. 

§ 1158(a); Pub. L. No. 104-208, 110 Stat. 3009 (1996). As 

the Dissent recognizes, these “1996 amendments did not 

somehow work a major change in the law,” Dissent at 63; 

both versions draw a distinction between an alien who is 

already “physically present in the United States” on the one 

hand and arriving aliens on the other, including, in the earlier 

version, aliens “at a land border,” in the process of arriving.

A person standing at the border is not necessarily across

it, so the original statutory phrase, like the newer one, 

includes the penultimate stage in the process of arriving in 

the United States. Under the metering policy, CBP officers 

stationed just behind the limit line between Mexico and the 

United States interacted with individuals standing at the 

border; travelers with documentation were permitted to cross 

into the United States, while others without 

documentation—including provisional class members—

and that one such stage includes aliens “attempting to enter.” See 

Implementation of Title III of the Illegal Immigration Reform and 

Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996: Hearing Before the Subcomm. on 

Immigration and Claims of the H. Comm. on the Judiciary, 105th Cong. 

17–18 (1997).

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30 AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF

were turned back. Provisional class members were both “at 

a land border” and “arriving” before being turned back.

The government’s central contention as to why the 

district court’s statutory interpretation is wrong is that the 

“statute confers a right to apply for asylum only on those 

who are within the United States.” “A present-tense phrase 

like ‘arrives in’ speaks to the present moment of arrival, not 

some potential arrival in the future,” the government argues. 

In support of its interpretation of “arrives in,” the 

government relies principally on the presumption against 

extraterritoriality as reason to disregard the rule against 

surplusage, the Dictionary Act, section 1225’s “arriving in” 

language, and the legislative history, which collectively led 

the district court to the opposite conclusion. The district 

court rejected application of the presumption against 

extraterritoriality here, noting that “[i]t is natural to expect 

that Congress intends for laws that regulate conduct that 

occurs near international borders to apply to some activity 

that takes place on the foreign side of those borders,” 394 F. 

Supp. 3d at 1202 (quoting United States v. Villanueva, 

408 F.3d 193, 199 (5th Cir. 2005)), and that the text of 

sections 1158 and 1225 and the legislative history show that 

Congress “intended the statute to apply to asylum seekers in 

the process of arriving,” even if they are not yet quite within 

our borders, id.

Notably, the district court’s analysis does not authorize 

asylum seekers to submit an asylum application from outside 

the United States; it recognizes only that the statutory right 

to apply attaches once the asylum seeker is on the doorstep—

“at a land border,” in the words of the earlier iteration of the 

statute—in the process of arriving. Despite the Dissent’s 

protestations, see Dissent at 59–62 this reading is fully 

consistent with the Supreme Court’s observation that section 

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AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF 31

1158 “sets out the process by which refugees currently in the 

United States may be granted asylum,” INS v. CardozaFonseca, 480 U.S. 421, 433 (1987); aliens do not actually 

submit an asylum application until after they have completed 

the process of arriving in the United States.

The district court’s linguistic and contextual analysis has 

considerable force. Although it is likely correct, we need not

decide at this juncture whether it is. We need only determine 

whether, given the minimal—at best—showing of 

irreparable harm, the government has made a particularly 

strong showing that the district court’s statutory 

interpretation will be disapproved on review of the 

preliminary injunction. That the government has most 

definitely failed to do.

As to the second government argument, the question is 

whether there is a particularly strong likelihood that the 

government will succeed in establishing on appeal that even 

if the class members did arrive and so had a statutory right 

to be considered for asylum under section 1158(a)(1), and 

although they were “arriving in the United States” and so 

should have been “refer[ed] . . . for an interview by an 

asylum officer,” 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(1)(A)(ii), their right to 

asylum must be determined not as of the time they met the 

statutory requirements for consideration for asylum but as of 

the time they are ultimately allowed to enter.11

11 We note that the government may be right that, because the class 

members were “metered,” they will arrive a second time when they get 

to the top of the waitlist and are finally admitted and processed. And 

because the district court has not yet decided whether the delay in 

processing the class member’s asylum requests and requiring them to 

stay in Mexico in the meanwhile is itself violative of their statutory or 

constitutional rights, we assume for present purposes that it was not. 

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32 AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF

Under the statute as construed by the district court, each 

arrival triggers a right to apply for asylum and be 

interviewed by an asylum officer. The government does not 

maintain otherwise—that is, it does not dispute that the INA 

guarantees a right to apply for asylum to any noncitizen who 

arrives in the United States. Rather, aside from its 

disagreement with the district court’s conclusion that class 

members did “arrive,” the government’s argument is that 

“[n]othing in the Rule suggests that only an alien’s first 

attempt at entry counts, and nothing makes prior attempts at 

entry relevant.”

The government does not have a strong chance of 

succeeding on this point. It is the INA, not the Rule, that 

makes an alien’s first arrival legally significant. Under the 

district court’s statutory interpretation, a class member’s first 

arrival triggered a statutory right to apply for asylum and 

have that application considered. See 8 U.S.C. §§ 1158, 

1225(a)(3), 1225(b)(1)(A)(ii); 394 F. Supp. 3d at 1203–05. 

Nothing in the INA or regulations suggests that a class 

member loses her statutory right to apply for asylum as of 

her arrival because there is a government-imposed delay 

between when she arrives and when her application is 

accepted and processed.12 As the Rule was not in place at the 

Neither of these considerations, however, affects whether the first arrival 

triggered a statutory right to be considered for asylum even if that 

consideration was not immediate.

12 The provisionally certified class is defined to include only those 

asylum seekers who were involuntarily turned away “and who continue 

to seek access to the U.S. asylum process.” Thus, there can be no 

argument that class members abandoned their statutory right to submit 

an asylum claim. In contrast, the Dissent’s hypothetical asylum seeker 

who is metered “and then returns to a United States port of entry many 

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AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF 33

time each class member’s right to apply for asylum attached, 

it makes sense that it would not apply.

The government’s premise—assuming acceptance of the 

district court’s statutory interpretation of “arrives” and 

“arriving in the United States”—must be that any second 

arrival cancels out the statutory obligation that arose at the 

time of the original arrival to receive and process the class 

member’s asylum application. No reasoning is provided to 

substantiate this cancellation theory. It is more likely that the 

first arrival is governed by the eligibility requirements at the 

time the right to be considered for asylum arose than that 

regulations imposed after the fact will cancel out the earlier 

eligibility. Put another way, class members will be governed 

by the Rule if they seek asylum based on a second arrival, 

but they also arrived earlier and, under the statute, were quite 

likely entitled to asylum consideration triggered by that 

arrival, even if that consideration was delayed. At least, the 

government has not made a showing that this statutory 

understanding is incorrect strong enough to counterbalance 

its weak irreparable harm evidence.

In sum, the government has not met its burden to make a 

sufficiently strong showing of a likelihood of success on the 

merits. Even if its weak showing of harm met the minimum 

threshold, the government has not made a sufficient showing 

of likelihood of success on the merits strong enough to 

warrant a stay pending appeal under the sliding scale 

approach. See Nken, 556 U.S. at 434; Wild Rockies, 632 F.3d 

at 1131.

years later,” see Dissent at 71, would likely have voluntarily abandoned 

their right to submit an asylum claim by waiting many years to return.

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34 AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF

C. 

“Because the Government has not ‘satisfie[d] the first 

two factors,’ we need not dwell on the final two factors—

‘harm to the opposing party’ and ‘the public interest.’” E. 

Bay Sanctuary Covenant v. Trump, 932 F.3d 742, 778 (9th 

Cir. 2018) (quoting Nken, 556 U.S. at 435). Even so, the 

balance of equities and public interest tip sharply in Al Otro 

Lado’s favor.

The third factor, “whether issuance of the stay will 

substantially injure the other parties interested in the 

proceeding,” Nken, 556 U.S. at 434, weighs heavily against 

granting the stay. In contrast to the showing of harm by the 

government, Al Otro Lado has offered ample evidence that 

enforcement of the Rule against the provisionally certified 

class would cause not only substantial but irreparable injury 

to them. See id. The class relied to their detriment on the 

government’s representations. As the district court observed, 

“[t]hey returned to Mexico reasonably believing that if they 

followed these procedures, they would eventually have an 

opportunity to make a claim for asylum in the United 

States.” The Rule would now make them ineligible for 

asylum in the United States, and they cannot in all 

probability pursue asylum in Mexico “because they did as 

the Government initially required and waited” for their 

number to be called.13 We agree with the district court that 

13 The government argues that this harm is self-inflicted because 

class members chose not to pursue asylum in Mexico. But the class 

members were not required to do so when they approached the POE to 

apply for asylum, and some class members face Mexico’s time bar 

because they relied on the government’s representations that they could 

apply for asylum in the United States if they waited in line.

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“[t]his situation, at its core, is quintessentially inequitable,” 

and likely will substantially injure class members.

As to the fourth factor, aspects of the public interest 

favor both sides. The public has a “weighty” interest “in 

efficient administration of the immigration laws at the 

border.” Landon v. Plasencia, 459 U.S. 21, 34 (1982). “But 

the public also has an interest in ensuring that ‘statutes 

enacted by [their] representatives’ are not imperiled by 

executive fiat.” E. Bay Sanctuary, 932 F.3d at 779 (quoting 

Maryland v. King, 567 U.S. 1301, 1301 (2012) (Roberts, 

C.J., in chambers)). “We need go no further than this; when 

considered alongside the Government’s failure to show 

irreparable harm, the final two factors do not weigh in favor 

of a stay.” Id.

III.

We emphasize that the question whether the injunction 

should be overturned—the merits of the ultimate appeal—is 

not before this motions panel. We are ruling only on the 

motion to stay the injunction pending appeal. “The decision 

whether to grant a stay is a ‘probabilistic’ endeavor. We 

discuss the merits of a stay request in ‘likelihood terms,’ and 

exercise a ‘restrained approach to assessing the merits.’” E. 

Bay Sanctuary Covenant v. Trump, 18-17274, __ F.3d __ 

(9th Cir. 2020) (quoting Sierra Club v. Trump, 929 F.3d 670, 

688 (9th Cir. 2019)).

Judge Bress criticizes this restrained approach. See

Dissent at 49, 59. But the “pre-adjudication adjudication” he 

advocates “would defeat the purpose of a stay, which is to 

give the reviewing court the time to ‘act responsibly,’ rather 

than doling out ‘justice on the fly.’” Leiva-Perez v. Holder, 

640 F.3d 962, 967 (9th Cir. 2011) (quoting Nken v. Holder, 

556 U.S. 418, 427 (2009)). Respecting the role of stay 

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motions requires that we decline to usurp the role of the 

preliminary injunction merits panel—which, it bears noting, 

is itself engaged in a probabilistic analysis preliminary to the 

eventual consideration of any request for a permanent 

injunction. Although seeking the collapse of these sequential 

steps into one has become increasingly common, see Barr v. 

E. Bay Sanctuary Covenant, 140 S. Ct. 3, 6 (2019) 

(Sotomayor, J., dissenting); Stephen I. Vladeck, The 

Solicitor General and the Shadow Docket, 133 Harv. L. Rev. 

123 (2019), premature determination of complex legal and 

factual issues will not in the long run produce wellconsidered and dependable judicial decision-making.

The government has not carried its burden of showing 

that a stay is warranted. Accordingly, we DENY the motion.

BRESS, Circuit Judge, dissenting:

In a case that does not challenge it, the district court 

below partially enjoined an asylum rule that the Supreme 

Court just months ago ordered could go into effect pending 

appeal. See Barr v. East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, 140 S.

Ct. 3 (2019). How could this even happen?

This case, which was brought in 2017, is a challenge to 

certain U.S. Customs and Border Protection “metering” 

practices. Due to a massive influx of immigrants and severe 

resource constraints at the southern border, CBP through 

“metering” limits the number of aliens who can gain access 

to U.S. ports of entry at a given time. The plaintiffs are 

asylum seekers waiting in Mexico or other countries who 

claim that metering violates our asylum laws.

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In July 2019, and years after this metering case was filed, 

the Attorney General and Acting Secretary of Homeland 

Security promulgated the “Third Country Transit Rule,” 

which generally bars asylum for persons who did not 

previously seek protection in a third country through which 

they journeyed on their way to the United States. See Asylum 

Eligibility and Procedural Modifications, 84 Fed. Reg. 

33,829 (2019), codified at 8 C.F.R. § 208.13(c)(4). This 

Rule was challenged in a separate lawsuit. After a district 

court in this circuit re-imposed a nationwide injunction 

blocking its implementation, the Supreme Court stayed the 

injunction, and allowed the Rule to go into effect pending 

appeal. East Bay, 140 S. Ct. at 3.

Shortly after the Supreme Court’s ruling in East Bay, the 

plaintiffs in this “metering” case—including Al Otro Lado, 

an advocacy group that was also a plaintiff in East Bay—

asked the district court to enjoin the Third Country Transit 

Rule as to persons who were metered. The district court 

agreed and enjoined application of the Rule as to a 26,000-

person subclass who were metered prior to July 16, 2019, the 

date that the Rule by its terms takes effect. Under the district 

court’s injunction, the government may not apply the Third 

Country Transit Rule to these persons, even though under 

East Bay the Rule may otherwise be applied.

We originally granted a temporary stay of the district 

court’s injunction, but my fine colleagues in the majority 

now unfortunately reverse course and deny a stay pending 

appeal. I would have granted the stay and so respectfully 

dissent. The majority’s refusal to grant a stay is wrong on 

many levels and forces immigration officials to undertake an 

effectively impossible mission at our already overwhelmed 

border with Mexico. Particularly where the Supreme Court 

has recently stayed an injunction of the very same asylum 

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Rule, one would expect the district court’s subsequent 

injunction of that Rule to be airtight. Instead, and 

regrettably, both the district court’s injunction and today’s 

decision reflect cascading legal error, wreaking further 

havoc on a southern border already in crisis.

There was no basis for the district court to enjoin the 

Third Country Transit Rule in this metering case. This case 

is not about the Third Country Transit Rule, the validity of 

which is not at issue. And the plaintiffs have not shown a 

likelihood of success that metering is unlawful. Indeed, a 

central premise of both the district court and the majority 

opinion is that metering may well be legitimate. Lawsuits, 

even putative class actions, are not an opportunity to declare 

open season on the implementation of every new 

government policy that comes along that bears some 

tangential relationship to the subject matter of a case. And 

courts cannot go around enjoining immigration rules in cases 

that do not challenge them, particularly where the Supreme 

Court has just allowed the rule to go into effect. The district 

court below greatly exceeded its powers.

Even so, the Third Country Transit Rule plainly applies 

to the plaintiffs in this case, so that enjoining it as to them 

was legal error. The Third Country Transit Rule applies to 

“any alien who enters, attempts to enter, or arrives in the 

United States across the southern land border on or after July 

16, 2019.” 8 C.F.R. § 208.13(c)(4). When plaintiffs reach 

this country, they will be entering or arriving in the United 

States after that date; the Rule thus plainly covers them. That 

should have been the end of this case or, more accurately, 

this issue, since this case is not about the Rule anyway. The 

district court’s decision holding otherwise, which the 

majority effectively endorses, is based on the theory that our 

asylum laws apply not only to persons physically “in” the 

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AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF 39

United States, but to persons outside the United States who 

are “in the processing of” arriving into it. That holding is 

unprecedented, contradicts the statutory text and settled law, 

and will create untold confusion in the interpretation of our 

asylum laws.

The immense problems of administration that the district 

court’s injunction will create are entirely predictable. Even 

though neither the metering practices nor the Third Country 

Transit Rule have been invalidated—and both are presently 

in effect, the latter by order of the Supreme Court—some 

26,000 persons who sought to enter the United States prior 

to July 16, 2019 and were unable to do so due to metering 

are now exempt from the Supreme Court’s order in East Bay. 

Requiring the government to now apply different rules to 

this subclass, and even figuring out who such persons are, 

will be an enormous and arduous task, made only more 

difficult by the lack of documentation and the incredible 

strain under which our immigration system already labors. 

Today’s decision will unfortunately cause only greater 

difficulty and confusion at a border that desperately needs 

neither.

The problems at our border with Mexico are among the 

most difficult of the day. Fair debates may be had about how 

to prioritize safety, humanitarian concerns, and costs. But 

the questions before us are legal ones. Under the factors that 

govern our review, we should have stayed the district court’s 

injunction. I therefore respectfully dissent.

I

A

This putative class action lawsuit, filed in 2017, 

challenges CBP’s practice of regulating the intake of aliens 

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arriving at U.S. ports of entry from Mexico. In response to 

record numbers of aliens seeking entry into the United States 

and substantial overcrowding at southern ports of entry, CBP 

instituted a policy known as “metering” or “queue 

management.” Metering policies limit the number of 

persons who can gain access to the ports of entry at a given 

time. When metering is in effect, CBP officers stand at the 

boundary line between our country and Mexico to limit the 

persons who may cross into the United States. Persons with 

valid documents are allowed into the port of entry, but 

persons who lack adequate documentation are not allowed 

in until the port of entry has capacity to accommodate them. 

Plaintiffs—a legal services organization named Al Otro 

Lado and a group of asylum seekers—claim that metering 

unlawfully denies access to the asylum process.

The allegations in plaintiffs’ operative complaint and 

supporting materials reflect a far-reaching challenge to 

metering practices across our country’s southern border. 

The formal metering policies at issue were implemented and 

enforced between 2016 and the present, though plaintiffs 

appear to challenge metering practices that may date back 

even farther. Plaintiffs challenge these policies at “Class A” 

United States ports of entry at the United States-Mexico 

border, which include the following locations from 

California to Texas: San Ysidro, California; Otay Mesa, 

California; Calexico, California; San Luis, Arizona; 

Nogales, Arizona; El Paso, Texas; Del Rio, Texas; Eagle 

Pass, Texas; Laredo, Texas; Roma, Texas; Hidalgo, Texas; 

Los Indios, Texas; and Brownsville, Texas. Some of these 

ports of entry, such as El Paso and Laredo, Texas are in more 

urban areas. Others, such as Los Indios and Roma, Texas 

are in more remote areas of the vast expanse that makes up 

our country’s border with Mexico.

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Based on plaintiffs’ allegations and supporting materials, 

persons from Mexico, Central and South America, and “all 

across the world,” have journeyed to our southern border 

with the goal of gaining entry into the United States. The 

record contains evidence that metering was applied to 

persons from a wide range of countries, including Haiti, 

Cuba, Venezuela, Iraq, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, 

Russia, Angola, Cameroon, and the Congo. Many of these 

persons do not have proper documentation.

Plaintiffs further allege that aliens have often approached 

the United States in large groups numbering in the hundreds 

and thousands. For example, plaintiffs allege that from June 

2016 to December 2016, “more than 15,000 Haitians 

migrated to Tijuana with the intent to seek protection in the 

United States.” Plaintiffs also allege that some formal 

metering policies were issued in response to an approaching 

group of roughly 1,500 immigrants from Central America 

and Mexico in the spring of 2018.

When not allowed into the United States due to metering, 

plaintiffs allege that putative class members either leave the 

border area or remain in the vicinity of the border in the hope 

of being allowed to pursue entry into this country. For 

example, materials that plaintiffs submitted in connection 

with their instant request for a preliminary injunction 

indicate that in November 2018, there were 4,700 persons 

from Central America, and perhaps many more, waiting in 

the Tijuana area alone. A central point of disagreement 

between the majority and this dissent centers on the 

reliability of certain “waitlists” that have been created by 

various groups in Mexico. I will have more to say about the 

waitlists later.

While plaintiffs contend that metering unlawfully denies 

them access to the asylum process in the United States, the 

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government maintains that metering is a necessary response 

to an overwhelming situation at the border. According to the 

government, in April 2019 alone, CBP encountered 

approximately 100,000 individuals seeking entry into the 

United States, often without documents. Randy Howe, 

CBP’s Executive Director for Operations in the Office of 

Field Operations, described this surge in migration as 

“unprecedented” and as representing “the highest monthly 

total in well over a decade.” It is the government’s position 

that ports of entry were often stretched to the limits, with 

ever-increasing numbers of aliens “surpass[ing] the physical 

capacity” of various ports and “result[ing] in a tremendous 

strain on all available local resources,” including personnel. 

The government claims it authorized metering practices to 

manage the large inflow of persons safely and properly.

The government moved to dismiss plaintiffs’ metering 

case, arguing that because asylum is only available to aliens 

“who [are] physically present in the United States or who 

arrive[] in the United States,” 8 U.S.C. § 1158(a)(1), persons 

who had been metered—and who thus had not entered the 

United States—had no right to apply for asylum. For this 

reason, the government argued that plaintiffs could not 

challenge metering as a violation of the asylum laws.

The district court denied the government’s motion. As 

discussed in greater detail below, the district court reasoned 

that our asylum laws extended not only to persons who were 

physically in the United States, but also aliens who were “in 

the process of arriving in the United States.” Al Otro Lado, 

Inc. v. McAleenan, 394 F. Supp. 3d 1168, 1199–1203 (S.D. 

Cal. 2019). The district court thus held that plaintiffs had 

stated a claim and allowed their metering lawsuit to proceed.

Importantly, the district court has not determined 

whether metering is unlawful, either at any particular port of 

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AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF 43

entry or across all ports of entry. Instead, the district court 

has “acknowledge[d] that it is entirely possible that there 

may exist potentially legitimate factors that prevent CBP 

officers from immediately discharging the mandatory 

duties” in the asylum laws. Id. at 1212. Plaintiffs’ challenge 

to CBP’s metering practices remains ongoing in the district 

court.

B

Meanwhile, on July 16, 2019, and approximately two 

years into this metering case, the Attorney General and 

Acting Secretary of Homeland Security issued the Third 

Country Transit Rule. See Asylum Eligibility and 

Procedural Modifications, 84 Fed. Reg. 33,829 (2019), 

codified at 8 C.F.R. § 208.13(c)(4). The Rule provides that

any alien who enters, attempts to enter, or 

arrives in the United States across the 

southern land border on or after July 16, 

2019, after transiting through at least one 

country outside the alien’s country of 

citizenship, nationality, or last lawful 

habitual residence in route to the United 

States, shall be found ineligible for asylum.

Id. The Rule does not apply to aliens who show that they 

applied for and were denied protection in a third country 

through which they traveled en route to the United States. 

Id. § 208.13(c)(4)(i). Nor does the Rule apply to asylum 

seekers who are “victim[s] of a severe form of trafficking” 

or if “[t]he only countries through which the alien transited 

en route to the United States were, at the time of transit, not 

parties to” certain international agreements. Id. 

§ 208.13(c)(4)(ii)–(iii). The Rule also does not bar asylum 

seekers from applying for withholding of removal or for 

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relief under the Convention Against Torture. Id.

§ 208.13(c)(1).1

In a wholly separate lawsuit captioned East Bay 

Sanctuary Covenant v. Barr, several organizations, 

including Al Otro Lado, challenged the Third Country 

Transit Rule on various grounds. See 385 F. Supp. 3d 922 

(N.D. Cal. 2019). Eight days after the Third Country Transit 

Rule was issued, a district court in our circuit entered a 

nationwide injunction blocking the Rule’s implementation. 

Id. Notably, the issue of metering factored into the district 

court’s injunction. As the district court explained:

The Court notes one additional equitable 

consideration suggested by the 

administrative record. The administrative 

record contains evidence that the government 

has implemented a metering policy that 

“force[s] migrants to wait weeks or months 

before they can step onto US soil and exercise 

their right to claim asylum.” At the same 

time, the record also indicates that Mexico 

requires refugees seeking protection to file 

claims within 30 days of entering the country. 

For asylum seekers that forfeited their ability 

to seek protection in Mexico but fell victim 

to the government’s metering policy, the 

equities weigh particularly strongly in favor 

of enjoining a rule that would now disqualify 

1 The district court and plaintiffs refer to the Rule as the “Asylum 

Ban.” But the Rule does not ban asylum. I will therefore refer to the 

Rule as the Third Country Transit Rule, except when quoting to the 

district court or plaintiffs’ submissions.

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them from asylum on a potentially unlawful 

basis. 

Id. at 959 (record citations omitted).

The government sought a stay of the district court’s 

injunction pending appeal. Our court rejected the 

injunction’s national reach and limited its scope to the Ninth 

Circuit only. East Bay Sanctuary Covenant v. Barr, 

934 F.3d 1026 (9th Cir. 2019). Shortly thereafter, the district 

court reissued its nationwide injunction. See East Bay 

Sanctuary Covenant v. Barr, 391 F. Supp. 3d 974 (N.D. Cal. 

2019). At that point, and although the majority relegates it 

to a footnote, see Maj. Op. 13 n.2, the Supreme Court 

stepped in and by a 7–2 vote stayed the district court’s orders 

“in full.” Barr v. East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, 140 S. Ct. 

3 (2019).

The Supreme Court thus allowed the Third Country 

Transit Rule to take effect over the objection of Al Otro Lado 

and others. The Supreme Court stayed the district court’s 

injunction “in full pending disposition of the Government’s 

appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth 

Circuit and disposition of the Government’s petition for writ 

of certiorari, if such writ is sought.” Id. The government’s 

appeal in East Bay remains pending in this court.

C

Just fifteen days after the Supreme Court issued its order 

in East Bay, the plaintiffs in this metering case—including 

Al Otro Lado—sought a partial injunction of the very same 

Third Country Transit Rule that the Supreme Court had just 

recently allowed to go into effect pending appeal. The 

plaintiffs sought this injunction on behalf of a subclass of 

some 26,000 non-Mexican aliens seeking asylum, who were 

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allegedly denied access to U.S. ports of entry prior to July 

16, 2019 because of CBP’s metering policies.

The plaintiffs did not purport to challenge the Third 

Country Transit Rule per se. Instead, the plaintiffs claimed 

the Third Country Transit Rule should not apply to them. As 

noted, that Rule applies to “any alien who enters, attempts to 

enter, or arrives in the United States across the southern land 

border on or after July 16, 2019.” 8 C.F.R. § 208.13(c)(4). 

The plaintiffs claimed the Rule should not apply to them 

because they had previously attempted to enter the United 

States prior to July 16, 2019, but were prevented from doing 

so due to metering.

In seeking an injunction, the plaintiffs likewise sought to 

certify a subclass of “approximately 26,000 asylum 

seekers,” who are “scattered in encampments and shelters in 

Mexican border cities.” Consistent with their underlying 

challenge to metering policies across the southern border, 

the proposed 26,000-person subclass consists of aliens from 

all over the world who sought entry over a period of years at 

numerous points of entries at the United States-Mexico 

border. This graphic from plaintiffs’ class motion shows the

breadth of the proposed subclass and U.S.-Mexico entry 

points that are implicated:

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On November 19, 2019, the district court granted 

plaintiffs’ motion and certified a subclass consisting of “all 

non-Mexican noncitizens who sought unsuccessfully to 

make a direct asylum claim at a U.S. [port of entry] before 

July 16, 2019, were instead required to wait in Mexico due 

to the U.S. Government’s metering policy, and who continue 

to seek access to the U.S. asylum process.” Al Otro Lado, 

Inc. v. McAleenan, 2019 WL 6134601, at *16 (S.D. Cal. 

Nov. 19, 2019). The district court also enjoined the Third 

Country Transit Rule as to this subclass. Id. at *16–20.

The district court reasoned that, although plaintiffs did 

not challenge the Third Country Transit Rule in their 

operative complaint, the court could nonetheless enjoin the 

Rule as to asylum seekers metered before July 16, 2019. Id.

at *10. The district court held that the Rule “by its express 

terms, does not apply to those non-Mexican foreign 

nationals in the subclass who attempted to enter or arrived at 

the southern border before July 16, 2019 to seek asylum but 

were prevented from making a direct claim at a [port of 

entry] pursuant to the metering policy.” Id. at *17 (emphasis 

in original). The district court also relied on its earlier ruling 

on the government’s motion to dismiss, in which it had held 

that the persons who had not yet entered the United States, 

but who were “‘in the process of arriving in the United States 

through a [port of entry],’” were covered under the asylum 

statutes. Id. at *17 (quoting Al Otro Lado, 394 F. Supp. 3d 

at 1200).

On December 4, 2019, the government filed a motion in 

the district court for an emergency stay of the injunction 

pending appeal, requesting a ruling by December 11, 2019. 

After the district court signaled that it would not rule on the 

stay motion by the requested date, the government filed in 

this court a motion for stay pending appeal, along with an 

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emergency motion for an administrative stay. 

Accompanying its motion, the government submitted 

declarations from Randy Howe, Executive Director for 

Operations, Office of Field Operations, U.S. Customs and 

Border Protection; Ashley Caudill-Mirillo, Deputy Chief of 

the Asylum Division with the U.S. Citizenship and 

Immigration Services (USCIS), U.S. Department of 

Homeland Security; and Sirce Owen, an Assistant Chief 

Immigration Judge in the Executive Office for Immigration 

Review. As described later, these declarations attested to the 

government’s hardship in complying with the district court’s 

injunction and the irreparable harm that the injunction 

causes.

On December 20, 2019, we granted the government’s 

motion for a temporary stay, noting, among other things that 

“[p]rohibiting the government from applying the Rule to the 

proposed class members could cause complications at the 

border.” Al Otro Lado v. Wolf, 945 F.3d 1223, 1224 (9th 

Cir. 2019). The court now goes in a different direction and 

allows the district court’s injunction to go back into effect. 

Because this decision is wrong as a matter of law, I 

respectfully dissent.

II

The following familiar factors govern the government’s 

request for a stay of the district court’s injunction pending 

appeal:

(1) whether the stay applicant has made a 

strong showing that he is likely to succeed on 

the merits; (2) whether the applicant will be 

irreparably injured absent a stay; (3) whether 

issuance of the stay will substantially injure 

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the other parties interested in the proceeding; 

and (4) where the public interest lies.

City & Cty. of S.F. v. USCIS, 944 F.3d 773, 789 (9th Cir. 

2019) (quoting Nken v. Holder, 556 U.S. 418, 433–34 

(2009)).

Usually—and nearly without fail—we analyze those 

factors in order. See, e.g., id. at 790–807; FTC v. Qualcomm 

Inc., 935 F.3d 752, 755–57 (9th Cir. 2019); Sierra Club v. 

Trump, 929 F.3d 670, 687–707 (9th Cir. 2019); Innovation 

Law Lab v. McAleenan, 924 F.3d 503, 506–10 (9th Cir. 

2019) (per curiam); Lair v. Bullock, 697 F.3d 1200, 1203–

15 (9th Cir. 2012); Golden Gate Restaurant Ass’n v. City & 

Cty. of S.F., 512 F.3d 1112, 1119–27 (9th Cir. 2008). In the 

classic recitation of the factors governing a request for a stay, 

likelihood of success on the merits is listed first. That is how 

the majority itself lays out the standard. See Maj. Op. 17.

One will notice that the majority opinion inverts the 

traditional stay analysis, beginning with irreparable harm 

and demoting the merits to secondary status. This is not 

accidental, but tactical. We are told that because “[t]he 

government has made a weak showing that it will suffer 

harm” pending appeal, Maj. Op. 18, it must not make merely 

“a strong showing that [it] is likely to succeed on the merits,” 

Nken, 556 U.S. at 434, but rather a showing that is “strong 

enough to counterbalance its weak irreparable harm 

evidence.” Maj. Op. 33. By seemingly inflating the 

government’s required showing, the majority trends toward 

a new, undefined standard that waters down the merits 

analysis. And it is unclear how strong is “strong enough” in 

a case like this one, where the government’s merits 

arguments are purely legal in nature, turning on the 

interpretation of statutes and regulations.

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The sequencing of today’s opinion can only reflect the 

majority’s implicit acknowledgement that the government’s 

case is strongest where it most matters, namely, the 

likelihood of success on the merits. That explains the 

majority’s tepid endorsement of the district court’s merits 

analysis, which the majority only describes as “likely 

correct,” “sufficiently sound,” and having “considerable 

force.” Maj. Op. 26–27, 31. The strength of the 

government’s merits arguments likely explains why the 

majority feels the apparent need to elevate the government’s 

burden on likelihood of success on the merits before 

addressing them. Hence the decision to lead with irreparable 

harm first.

The issuance of a stay “is to be guided by sound legal 

principles,” and “those legal principles have been distilled 

into” the traditional four-factor test I quoted above, Nken, 

556 U.S. at 434 (quotations omitted), not factors with new 

modifiers around them. In this case, and under the governing 

standards, the government has made both “a strong showing 

that [it] is likely to succeed on the merits” and that it “will 

be irreparably injured absent a stay.” City & Cty. of S.F., 

944 F.3d at 789.

III

A

I begin, as we usually do, with the merits. But the merits 

of what exactly? Not the merits of CBP’s metering policies, 

which is what this lawsuit is actually about. The legality of 

metering remains a live issue in the district court, with the 

district court acknowledging “it is entirely possible” that 

metering could be founded on “legitimate factors.” Al Otro 

Lado, Inc., 394 F. Supp. 3d at 1212. Indeed, the district court 

issued its injunction “assuming the Government’s metering 

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AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF 51

practice was legal.” Al Otro Lado, 2019 WL 6134601, 

at *13. The majority opinion rests on the same assumption: 

“because the district court has not yet decided whether the 

delay in processing the class member[s’] asylum requests 

and requiring them to stay in Mexico in the meanwhile is 

itself violative of their statutory or constitutional rights, we 

assume for present purposes that it was not.” Maj. Op. 31

n.11.

But if metering is potentially lawful and not even at issue 

in this preliminary injunction proceeding, on what basis 

could the district court partially enjoin the wholly separate 

and later-enacted Third Country Transit Rule, whose legality 

is not questioned here either? Somehow a motion for 

preliminary injunction that challenges neither metering nor 

the Third Country Transit Rule has used the prospect of a 

challenge to the former as a justification for partially 

enjoining the latter.

The majority never explains why this is at all 

appropriate. This metering case plodded along for years 

until the government enacted the Third Country Transit 

Rule. Then, and not long after the ink had dried on an 

unsuccessful effort to obtain a preliminary injunction of that 

Rule, see East Bay, 140 S. Ct. at 3, the plaintiffs—including 

Al Otro Lado, a plaintiff from East Bay itself—tried to use 

this metering case to accomplish, in part, what East Bay thus 

far has not. Under the circumstances and our case law, the 

district court’s partial injunction of the Third Country 

Transit Rule exceeded the equitable powers of the federal 

courts.

We have made clear that “[a] court’s equitable power lies 

only over the merits of the case or controversy before it,” so 

that “[w]hen a plaintiff seeks injunctive relief based on 

claims not pled in the complaint, the court does not have the 

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52 AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF

authority to issue an injunction.” Pac. Radiation Oncology, 

LLC v. Queen’s Med. Ctr., 810 F.3d 631, 632 (9th Cir. 

2015). That principle of law is well-accepted. See, e.g., 

Alabama v. U.S. Army Corps of Eng’rs, 424 F.3d 1117, 1134 

(11th Cir. 2005) (“To secure preliminary injunctive relief, a 

petitioner must demonstrate a substantial likelihood of 

prevailing on at least one of the causes of action he has 

asserted.”); Omega World Travel, Inc. v. Trans World 

Airlines, 111 F.3d 14, 16 (4th Cir. 1997) (“[A] preliminary 

injunction may never issue to prevent an injury or harm 

which not even the moving party contends was caused by the 

wrong claimed in the underlying action.”); Devose v. 

Herrington, 42 F.3d 470, 471 (8th Cir. 1994) (per curiam) 

(“[A] party moving for a preliminary injunction must 

necessarily establish a relationship between the injury 

claimed in the party’s motion and the conduct asserted in the 

complaint.”). The district court’s injunction easily fails this 

test, both because the Third Country Transit Rule was not 

otherwise at issue in this case, and because the district 

court’s partial injunction of that Rule does not turn on the 

merits of plaintiffs’ metering claims.

The district court apparently believed that our decision 

in Pacific Radiation was no obstacle to enjoining the Third 

Country Transit Rule because, in its view, “Plaintiffs’ claims 

regarding the [the Rule] and Plaintiffs’ underlying claims in 

their [Second Amended Complaint] are so intertwined that 

denying Plaintiffs’ Motion for Preliminary Injunction could 

effectively eviscerate the asylum claims Plaintiffs seek to 

preserve in their underlying lawsuit.” Al Otro Lado, 2019 

WL 6134601, at *10. That is not correct.

For a federal court to issue an injunction, there must be 

“a sufficient nexus between the claims raised in a motion for 

injunctive relief and the claims set forth in the underlying 

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AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF 53

complaint itself.” Pac. Radiation, 810 F.3d at 636. Here 

there is no claim in the operative complaint concerning the 

Third Country Transit Rule, which did not come along until 

years into this case. Under our precedent, moreover, “[t]he 

relationship between the preliminary injunction and the 

underlying complaint is sufficiently strong where the 

preliminary injunction would grant ‘relief of the same 

character as that which may be granted finally.’” Id. 

(quoting De Beers Consol. Mines v. United States, 325 U.S. 

212, 220 (1945)). In this case, the character of the relief 

sought in the motion for preliminary injunction is entirely 

different from that sought in the complaint: the complaint 

concerns delays in processing asylum seekers, whereas the 

Third Country Transit Rule concerns eligibility 

requirements for asylum itself.

The majority opinion asserts that the operative complaint 

and injunction both “sought to preserve class members’ 

access to the asylum process.” Maj. Op. 16 n.6. But the 

injunction is not about “access to the asylum process,” but 

claimed entitlement to asylum itself, which is not at issue in 

this metering case. And even if it was, casting the complaint 

and injunction at such a high level of generality would 

undermine the limitations that Pacific Radiation imposes. 

Indeed, Pacific Radiation expressly rejected an effort to 

secure an injunction by “merely asserting that the claims are 

related or incorporated into [the] complaint.” 810 F.3d 

at 637.

The approach taken by the district court and majority 

opinion is therefore dramatic in its potential: in a case that 

does not challenge them, it would authorize injunctions of 

any current or future asylum-related rule, the application of 

which likewise “could” just as easily “eviscerate” plaintiffs’ 

eventual asylum claims. Al Otro Lado, 2019 WL 6134601, 

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54 AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF

at *10. And it would allow such injunctions on the 

assumption that the governmental conduct at issue in the 

case—here, metering—is lawful. Id. at *11, 13. The result 

is a mission creep nowhere authorized in our precedents, 

where an expansive and long-running lawsuit like this one 

can become the forum for challenging any future 

governmental action in the general subject area. That the 

majority implicitly blesses this vast expansion of the federal 

courts’ injunctive powers in a footnote, Maj. Op. 16 n.6, is

deeply troubling.

The majority and district court also justify the injunction 

under the All Writs Act, 28 U.S.C. § 1651, on the theory that 

the Third Country Transit Rule “would effectively moot 

Plaintiffs’ request for relief in the underlying action by 

extinguishing their asylum claims.” Al Otro Lado, 2019 WL 

6134601, at *11; Maj. Op. 16 n.6. This is even farther afield 

and clearly incorrect. This metering case does not concern 

plaintiffs’ underlying asylum claims, which are not at issue 

here. And the Third Country Transit Rule obviously does 

not moot this metering case because it has no effect on 

Mexican asylum seekers to whom the Rule does not apply. 

Such Mexican asylum seekers are both named plaintiffs and 

part of the putative class challenging CBP’s metering 

practices.

The majority does not dispute this. Instead, it claims that 

the Third Country Transit Rule “would extinguish some 

provisional class members’ asylum claims.” Maj. Op. 16 n.6

(emphasis added). But neither the majority opinion nor the 

district court provide any authority for the remarkable 

proposition that the All Writs Act can be used as an allpurpose bulwark against mootness. If a party’s claims 

become moot, a court lacks jurisdiction to decide them. See, 

e.g., Center for Biological Diversity v. Lohn, 511 F.3d 960, 

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963 (9th Cir. 2007). And the All Writs Act only allows a 

court “to issu[e] process ‘in aid of’ its existing jurisdiction; 

the Act does not enlarge that jurisdiction.” Clinton v. 

Goldsmith, 526 U.S. 529, 534–35 (1999).

The notion that the All Writs Act could be used to enjoin 

anything that would make even one of 26,000 provisional 

class members’ claims moot reflects a sweeping theory of 

judicial power with no basis in principle or precedent. As 

the Supreme Court has explained in the context of similar 

statutory language in the Anti-Injunction Act, “[n]o case of 

this Court has ever held that an injunction to ‘preserve’ a 

case or controversy fits within the ‘necessary in aid of its 

jurisdiction’ exception.” Vendo Co. v. Lektro-Vend Corp., 

433 U.S. 623, 641 (1977) (plurality opinion); see also 

Charlton v. Estate of Charlton, 841 F.2d 988, 989 (9th Cir. 

1988) (interpreting All Writs Act in light of Anti-Injunction 

Act precedent). The All Writs Act “is not a grant of plenary 

power to federal courts.” Doe v. INS, 120 F.3d 200, 205 (9th 

Cir. 1997) (quotations omitted). Yet by today’s decision, it 

is.

Because the district court could not enter this injunction 

in this case, that should be the end of the matter and the 

injunction should have been stayed for this reason alone.

B

But even assuming, as the majority does, that the 

likelihood of success on the merits should focus instead on 

whether the Third Country Transit Rule applies to the 

plaintiff subclass, the government has shown a strong 

likelihood of success on that front as well.

As I set forth above, the Third Country Transit Rule 

provides that

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56 AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF

any alien who enters, attempts to enter, or 

arrives in the United States across the 

southern land border on or after July 16, 

2019, after transiting through at least one 

country outside the alien’s country of 

citizenship, nationality, or last lawful 

habitual residence in route to the United 

States, shall be found ineligible for asylum.

8 C.F.R. § 208.13(c)(4) (emphasis added). The district court 

held that this Rule did not apply to persons who had been 

metered prior to July 16, 2019. Al Otro Lado, 2019 WL 

6134601, at *17. Its central reasoning was that the Rule “by 

its express terms, does not apply to those non-Mexican 

foreign nationals in the subclass who attempted to enter or 

arrived at the southern border before July 16, 2019 to seek 

asylum but were prevented from making a direct claim at a 

[port of entry] pursuant to the metering policy.” Id. 

(emphasis in original). In the district court’s view, “[t]he 

Government’s position that the Asylum Ban applies to those 

who attempted to enter or arrived at the southern border 

seeking asylum before July 16, 2019 contradicts the plain 

text of their own regulation.” Id.

The majority and I at least appear to agree on one thing: 

this reasoning is definitely wrong. The Third Country 

Transit Rule applies to “any alien who enters, attempts to 

enter, or arrives in the United States across the southern land 

border on or after July 16, 2019.” 8 C.F.R. § 208.13(c)(4). 

It includes anyone, including the plaintiffs in this case, who 

will be attempting to enter the United States after July 16, 

2019. There is no exception for persons who previously tried 

to enter the United States and who were unable to do so, 

whether due to metering or any other reason. The district 

court was thus mistaken to believe that the Third Country 

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Transit Rule “by its express” terms contains a carve-out for 

metered persons. It does not. As the majority thus concedes, 

“the government may be right that, because the class 

members were ‘metered,’ they will arrive a second time 

when they get to the top of the waitlist and are finally 

admitted and processed.” Maj. Op. 31 n.11.

C

The majority nevertheless refuses to stay the district 

court’s injunction. Why? Notwithstanding the language of 

the Third Country Transit Rule, the majority holds that the 

government still has not shown a strong likelihood of 

success based on the district court’s earlier motion to dismiss 

ruling. Maj. Op. 27–31. In that ruling, the district court held 

that the asylum laws apply not only to persons physically 

present inside the United States, but also to persons “who 

[are] in the process of arriving in the United States through 

a [port of entry].” Al Otro Lado, 394 F. Supp. 3d at 1200. 

Extending this logic to plaintiffs’ request to enjoin the Third 

Country Transit Rule, the district court held that persons who 

were metered had arrived in the United States prior to July 

16, 2019, such that the Rule does not apply to them. Al Otro 

Lado, 2019 WL 6134601, at *17.

As I will now explain, the majority’s effective 

endorsement of the district court’s unprecedented motion to 

dismiss ruling works a revolution in immigration law. And 

the majority’s related holding that our country’s immigration 

laws are effectively frozen as of the time of metering, so that 

no new immigration eligibility requirement could apply to 

persons who had been metered, works an entirely new 

revolution beyond that. The majority’s twin determinations 

on this score contravene settled law, contradict our 

precedents, and wrongly allow a partial injunction of the 

very Third Country Transit Rule that the Supreme Court 

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58 AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF

recently allowed to go into effect pending appeal. See East 

Bay, 140 S. Ct. at 3.

1

An alien “who is physically present in the United States 

or who arrives in the United States” may apply for asylum. 

8 U.S.C. § 1158(a)(1). Another provision of the statute 

provides that aliens may receive asylum screening if they are 

“arriving in the United States.” Id. § 1225(b)(1)(A)(i)–(ii). 

Back when this case was about metering, the threshold legal 

issue before the district court at the motion to dismiss stage 

was whether metered persons could even claim a violation 

of the asylum laws, given that they had never physically 

entered the United States.

The district court held that they could. According to the 

district court, persons “‘who may not yet be in the United 

States, but who [are] in the process of arriving in the United 

States through a [port of entry,]’ were ‘arriving in the United 

States’ such that the statutory and regulatory provisions at 

issue applied to them.” Al Otro Lado, 2019 WL 6134601, 

at *17 (quoting Al Otro Lado, 394 F. Supp. 3d at 1199–

1205). To reach that conclusion, the district court reasoned 

that under the canon against surplusage, § 1158(a)(1)’s 

reference to a person “who arrives in the United States” must 

have a different meaning than someone “who is physically 

present in the United States.” Al Otro Lado, 394 F. Supp. 3d 

at 1199–1200. Focusing then on the phrase “arrives in the 

United States,” and while noting that “neither side raises 

th[e] point,” the district court held that under the Dictionary 

Act, “‘words used in the present tense include the future as 

well as the present.’” Id. at 1200 (quoting 1 U.S.C. § 1). 

From this the district court held that “Section 1158(a)(1)’s 

use of the present tense of ‘arrives’ plainly covers an alien 

who may not yet be in the United States, but who is the 

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AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF 59

process of arriving in the United States through a [port of 

entry].” Id.

In its order partially enjoining the Third Country Transit 

Rule, the district court relied on this earlier motion to dismiss 

ruling to hold that the Rule did not apply to persons who

were metered prior to July 16, 2019. Al Otro Lado, 2019 

WL 6134601, at *17. It is important to see at the outset that 

whether or not the district court’s motion to dismiss ruling is 

correct, its conclusion at the preliminary injunction stage did 

not follow: even if the plaintiffs had previously attempted to 

enter the United States prior to July 16, 2019, they are now 

attempting to enter it again after July 16, 2019. 8 C.F.R. 

§ 208.13(c)(4). As such, the Third Country Transit Rule 

clearly applies to them, whether or not they previously 

“arrived in” or were in the “process of arriving in” the United 

States at some earlier point. I take up this issue further below 

when addressing the majority’s apparent view that the 

immigration laws should be considered frozen as of the time 

plaintiffs were metered.

Regrettably, however, and with little independent 

reasoning of its own, the majority endorses the district 

court’s motion to dismiss ruling. Maj. Op. 27–31. After 

describing the district court’s reasoning, the majority with 

limited analysis states that “[t]he district court’s linguistic 

and contextual analysis has considerable force” and “is 

likely correct.” Maj. Op. 31.

In fact, however, the district court’s reasoning at the 

motion to dismiss stage was not correct, and the majority errs 

in giving it any credit. At the very least, the government has 

made a strong showing that the district court’s motion to 

dismiss ruling was not sound. This point should be very 

clear: neither the majority, the district court, nor the 

plaintiffs cite any authority for the proposition that our 

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60 AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF

country’s asylum laws apply to persons who are not 

physically located in the United States, but who are outside 

our borders yet “in the process of arriving in” the United 

States. The district court’s holding in this regard is 

unprecedented and runs counter to both the statutory text and 

established case law.

Before 1980, “there was no statutory basis for granting 

asylum to aliens who applied from within the United States.” 

INS v. Cardoza-Fonseca, 480 U.S. 421, 433 (1987). In 

1980, and as part of amendments to the Immigration and 

Nationality Act (INA), Congress separately addressed 

refugees applying for admission from outside the United 

States, as distinguished from asylum seekers asking for 

protection from within our borders. Id. As the Supreme 

Court has explained in describing these reforms, “Section 

207, 8 U.S.C. § 1157, governs the admission of refugees 

who seek admission from foreign countries. Section 208, 

8 U.S.C. § 1158, sets out the process by which refugees

currently in the United States may be granted asylum.” Id. 

(emphasis added).

It has thus long been understood that unlike admission 

for refugees, see 8 U.S.C. § 1157 (imposing certain 

population caps for resettling refugees), asylum under 

§ 1158 requires application from within the United States. 

As we have explained, “Section 207 [8 U.S.C. § 1157] 

establishes the procedure by which an alien not present in 

the United States may apply for entry as a refugee. . . .

Section 208 [8 U.S.C. § 1158], on the other hand, sets out 

the procedures for granting asylum to refugees within the 

United States.” Yang v. INS, 79 F.3d 932, 938 (9th Cir. 

1996) (emphasis in original); see also Singh v. Holder, 

649 F.3d 1161, 1167 (9th Cir. 2011) (en banc) (“Th[e] 

definition of a refugee contains no cross-reference to the 

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procedural requirements for asylum, such as being 

physically present in the United States . . . .”); Halaim v. 

INS, 358 F.3d 1128, 1133 (9th Cir. 2004) (“Because they are 

physically present in the United States, however, Petitioners 

are applying for asylum and withholding of deportation only 

under Section 208 of the INA, 8 U.S.C. § 1158.”); Sadhvani 

v. Holder, 596 F.3d 180, 183 (4th Cir. 2009) (“[T]he BIA 

did not abuse its discretion in denying relief based on the 

statutory requirement that one must be present in the United 

States to eligible for asylum.”); Kiyemba v. Obama, 555 F.3d 

1022, 1030 (D.C. Cir. 2009), vacated by 559 U.S. 131 

(2010), and judgment reinstated as amended, 605 F.3d 1046 

(D.C. Cir. 2010) (“[R]efugees apply from abroad; asylum 

applicants apply when already here[.]”).

Consistent with the foregoing, the text, structure, and 

history of the INA all confirm that an alien who approaches 

a port of entry, but who does not enter the United States, is 

not covered by the asylum laws. The INA’s asylum 

provisions are limited to aliens who are “physically present 

in the United States or who arrive[] in the United States” or 

“who [are] arriving in the United States.” See 8 U.S.C. 

§§ 1158(a)(1), 1225(b)(1)(B)(i)–(ii) (emphases added). 

This language unambiguously requires an alien to be in the 

United States to apply for asylum. The statute does not apply 

by its terms to someone who is “in the process of arriving” 

in the United States, but who is not yet here. One who 

“arrives in the United States,” 8 U.S.C. § 1158(a)(1) is one 

who, at the very least, has crossed into the United States. 

See, e.g., The American Heritage Dictionary 102 (3d ed. 

1992) (defining “arrive” as “[t]o reach a destination”); The 

Oxford English Dictionary 651 (2d ed. 1989) (defining 

“arrive” as “to come to land at, reach (a shore, port, etc.)” 

and “[t]o come to the end of a journey, to a destination, or to 

some definitive place”). When we say that a person 

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“arrives” in a location, we mean he reaches that location, not 

that he is somewhere on his travels toward it. An alien thus 

“arrives in” the United States or he does not; there is no inbetween.

The majority nevertheless relies on the district court’s 

use of the canon against surplusage, which the district court 

held requires that “arrives in the United States” must mean 

something different than “physically present in the United 

States.” Maj. Op. 27 (citing 8 U.S.C. § 1158(a)). The 

district court’s surplusage analysis fails upon closer scrutiny. 

The Refugee Act of 1980 originally ordered the Attorney 

General to accept asylum applications from any alien 

“physically present in the United States or at a land border 

or port of entry, irrespective of such alien’s status.” 8 U.S.C. 

§ 1158(a) (1980). The majority suggests without citation 

that this earlier language covered “[a] person standing at the 

border,” but who was “not necessarily across it.” Maj. Op. 

29 (emphasis in original). The majority identifies no court 

that has accepted this interpretation of the 1980 Act, nor does 

it address the fact that both the Supreme Court and this court 

have described the 1980 provision as applying to “refugees 

currently in the United States,” Cardozo-Fonseca, 480 U.S. 

at 433, and “refugees within the United States,” Yang, 

79 F.3d at 938 (emphasis in original).

In the landmark Illegal Immigration Reform and 

Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), Pub. L. No. 

104-208, 110 Stat. 3009, Congress revised the statutory 

language in § 1158(a)(1), so that it now provides that “[a]ny 

alien who is physically present in the United States or who 

arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated 

port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the 

United States after having been interdicted in international 

or United States waters), irrespective of such alien’s status, 

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may apply for asylum.” 8 U.S.C. § 1158(a); see generally 

East Bay Sanctuary Covenant v. Trump, 932 F.3d 742, 757–

58 (2018) (describing the IIRIRA changes to the statutory 

scheme). The 1996 amendments did not somehow work a 

major change in the law to enable persons who were outside 

the United States, but “in the process” of arriving into it, to 

apply for asylum.

Prior to 1996, our immigration laws set forth two types 

of expulsion proceedings: deportation and exclusion. See 

Vartelas v. Holder, 566 U.S. 257, 261 (2012); Jama v. ICE, 

543 U.S. 335, 349 (2005); Lezama-Garcia v. Holder, 

666 F.3d 518, 526 (9th Cir. 2011). In the 1996 immigration 

reforms, Congress “abolished the distinction between 

exclusion and deportation procedures and created a uniform 

proceeding known as ‘removal.’” Vartelas, 566 U.S. at 262. 

Congress also created expedited removal proceedings for 

aliens “arriving in” the United States who seek to procure 

entry through fraudulent means or who lack proper 

documentation. 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(1)(A)(i). Congress 

further authorized the Attorney General to place in expedited 

removal proceedings certain persons who had been 

physically present in the United States for less than two 

years. Id. § 1225(b)(1)(iii). Nevertheless, most persons 

subject to expedited removal can request asylum and be 

referred for a credible fear interview “either at a port of entry 

or at such other place designated by the Attorney General.” 

Id. § 1225(b)(1)(A)(ii), (B)(i).

Properly considered, the phrases “arrives in the United 

States,” 8 U.S.C. §§ 1158(a)(1), 1225(a)(1), or “arriving in 

the United States,” id. § 1225(b)(1)(A)(i), did not extend our 

asylum laws to persons outside the physical boundaries of 

the United States. Instead, the point was to identify certain 

persons who could be subject to expedited removal, while 

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ensuring that they could still pursue asylum. 

Id. § 1225(b)(1)(A)–(B); see also Succar v. Ashcroft, 

394 F.3d 8, 13 (1st Cir. 2005) (“Congress established 

expedited removal proceedings for arriving non-citizens 

who are charged as inadmissible due to lack of proper 

documents or material misrepresentations at entry. 

Expedited removal proceedings provide little opportunity 

for relief; however, aliens in this situation can seek 

asylum.”) (quotations omitted).

Nothing in these changes suggested that from the 

perspective of whether the asylum applicant had to be 

located in the United States, there was a difference between 

a person “present in the United States” and one “who arrives 

in the United States.” 8 U.S.C. § 1225(a)(1); see also 

id. § 1158(a)(1). A change of that magnitude, and 

particularly one made through the 1996 immigration 

reforms—widely regarded as placing important new limits

on immigration, see Morales-Izquierdo v. Gonzales, 

486 F.3d 484, 494 (9th Cir. 2007) (en banc); AvendanoRamirez v. Ashcroft, 365 F.3d 813, 819–20 (9th Cir. 2004)—

would surely have been made quite explicitly. The district 

court’s invocation of the canon against surplusage was 

therefore misplaced.

Not only was the district court incorrect to apply the 

canon against surplusage, its effort to do so led it to misapply 

the Dictionary Act, an error the majority unfortunately 

credits. Maj. Op. 27. The district court relied upon a 

provision in the Dictionary Act which states that “unless the 

context indicates otherwise,” “words used in the present 

tense include the future as well as the present.” 1 U.S.C. § 1. 

From this it concluded that “arrives in”—which it believed 

must have a different meaning than “physically present 

in”—had to include “an alien who may not yet be in the 

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United States, but who is the process of arriving in the 

United States through a [port of entry].” Al Otro Lado, 

394 F. Supp. 3d at 1200.

The conclusion does not follow. Courts cannot 

“invoke[] the Dictionary Act in an effort to convert an 

unambiguous verb tense into claimed ambiguity,” and then 

use “that manufactured ambiguity as a stepping stone to 

altering the plain sense of a statute.” Guidiville Band of 

Pomo Indians v. NGV Gaming, Ltd., 531 F.3d 767, 775 (9th 

Cir. 2008). Here, the district court used the Dictionary Act 

not to read “arrives” in both the present and future tense, but 

to change the entire definition of “arrives” to include the 

“process of arriving.” And if the phrase “arrives in” does 

refer to something in the future, there is no reason to limit 

that interpretation, as the district court did, to someone “in 

the process of arriving in” the United States, as opposed to 

someone who took some other antecedent step toward 

arriving in this country. The uncertainty of what it means to 

be “in the process of arriving” raises a host of interpretative 

and practical issues that the majority does not address.

In all events, if the district court had been consistent in 

its application of the Dictionary Act, it would have read “is

physically present in the United States”—also framed in the 

present tense—to refer to the future as well. 8 U.S.C. 

§ 1158(a)(1). But that would have erased the very 

distinction that the surplusage canon supposedly required. 

There too, of course, the statute in the future tense would 

merely reflect the unremarkable proposition that one who 

will be physically present in the United States will be able to 

apply for asylum once they are here. It would not mean that 

one who is in the process of becoming physically present 

would have that same statutory right. This same logic 

applies to the phrase “arrives in” as well.

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66 AL OTRO LADO V. WOLF

The district court believed, and the majority apparently 

agrees, that 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b) supported the district court’s 

“in the process of” theory. Maj. Op. 27. As described above, 

§ 1225(b)(1) references aliens “arriving in the United 

States.” The district court held that this phrase supported its 

interpretation of § 1158(a)(1), because § 1225(b)’s “use of 

the present progressive, like use of the present participle, 

denotes an ongoing process.” Al Otro Lado, 394 F. Supp. 3d 

at 1200.

The district court’s (and majority’s) reading collapses 

when § 1225 is read as a whole. See, e.g., Sturgeon v. Frost, 

136 S. Ct. 1061, 1070 (2016) (“It is a fundamental canon of 

statutory construction that the words of a statute must be read 

in their context and with a view to their place in the overall 

statutory scheme.”) (quotations omitted). In this case, the 

very provision the district court relied upon states that “[i]f 

an immigration officer determines that an alien ... who is 

arriving in the United States ... is inadmissible, the officer 

shall order the alien removed from the United States without 

further hearing or review.” 8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(1)(A)(i) 

(emphasis added). For an alien to be “removed from the 

United States,” the alien must of course have been in the 

United States in the first place.

There are various other aspects of § 1225 and § 1158 that 

likewise do not make sense if “arriving in” means something 

short of setting foot in the United States. Section 1225(b), 

for example, concerns the “inspection” of aliens “arriving in 

the United States.” Aliens must be screened in inspections, 

8 U.S.C. § 1225(b)(1)(A), before proceeding to asylum 

interviews, id. § 1225(b)(1)(B). These inspections apply to 

any person “present in the United States” or “who arrives in 

the United States.” Id. § 1225(a)(1). There is no suggestion 

in § 1225 that CBP officers could inspect persons who did 

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not enter the United States. Under § 1158(a)(2)(B), to give 

another example, an alien must generally apply for asylum 

“within 1 year after the date of the alien’s arrival in the 

United States.” It is unclear how this and other provisions 

would apply if arrival were an “ongoing process” that 

includes periods prior to entering the United States. Maj. 

Op. 27. The majority’s endorsement of the district court’s 

reasoning thus injects confusion in our immigration laws, 

with no basis in the statutory text.

Finally, relying upon the district court, the majority 

states that “the legislative history is consistent with its 

interpretation of ‘arrives in’ as denoting an ongoing 

process.” Maj. Op. 28 & n.10. By “legislative history,” the 

majority means the written statement of a single 

congressman, Representative Lamar Smith of Texas. Al 

Otro Lado, 394 F. Supp. 3d at 1201. It is difficult to call this 

statement legislative history. The statement is in fact a letter 

sent by Rep. Smith to the Director of the Immigration and 

Naturalization Service (INS) about a proposed INS 

rulemaking (the letter was later placed in the congressional 

record). See Implementation of Title III of the Illegal 

Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act of 

1996: Hearing Before the Subcomm. On Immigration and 

Claims of the H. Comm. On the Judiciary, 105th Cong. 

(1997), at 13–28 (letter from Rep. Smith to INS). The letter 

also post-dates the enactment of the IIRIRA. See Bruesewitz 

v. Wyeth LLC, 562 U.S. 223, 242 (2011) (“Post-enactment 

legislative history (a contradiction in terms) is not a 

legitimate tool of statutory interpretation.”).

Even assuming this is true legislative history, the usual 

warnings about its use would apply. See Conroy v. Aniskoff, 

507 U.S. 511, 518–28 (1993) (Scalia, J., concurring). In this 

case, however, there is a more fundamental problem, which 

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is that the majority block-quotes the district court’s opinion 

discussing this “legislative history,” Maj. Op. 28, but the

district court in quoting that material used an ellipsis to omit 

critical context from the quoted passage. The following is 

the full quote from Rep. Smith’s letter. I have bolded the 

text that the district court (and majority) omit with an 

ellipsis; notably, most of that same material was italicized 

for emphasis in Rep. Smith’s letter:

The term ‘arriving alien’ was specifically 

selected by Congress in order to provide a 

flexible concept that would include all aliens 

who are in the process of physical entry past 

our borders, regardless of whether they are 

at a designated port of entry, on a seacoast, 

or at a land border. Thus, an ‘arriving 

alien’ will in many cases include an alien 

who, under the current interpretation of 

section 101(a)(13) of the INA definition of 

‘entry’, would have been found to have 

made an ‘entry.’ In specific terms, an alien 

who has entered U.S. territory between ports 

of entry on our land borders, or who has 

come ashore on a smuggling boat, should be 

considered an ‘arriving alien’ even if that 

alien has penetrated several hundred yards 

or even farther into United States territory 

and has been in that territory for several 

hours. ‘Arrival’ in this context should not be 

considered ephemeral or instantaneous, but, 

consistent with common usage, as a process. 

An alien apprehended at any stage of this 

process, whether attempting to enter, at the 

point of entry, or just having made entry, 

should be considered an ‘arriving alien’ for

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the various purposes in which that term is 

used in the newly revised portions of the 

INA.

1997 IIRIRA Subcomm. Hrg. at 17–18 (bold added; italics in 

original).

Rep. Smith was certainly not advocating for an 

interpretation of “arriving” that would accord asylum 

protection to persons who had not crossed into the United 

States. Instead, and consistent with what he later describes 

as “the pro-enforcement philosophy of” the INA, Rep. Smith 

sought to ensure that aliens who had “entered U.S. territory” 

and proceeded some ways past the border should still be 

treated as “arriving” in the United States and subject to the 

expedited procedures applicable to such persons. Id. at 17–

19. That is the stated “context” of Rep. Smith’s comments 

about the word “arrival”—“context” that the ellipsis 

eliminated. And that is why Rep. Smith elsewhere referred 

to “physical entry past our borders” and persons “having 

crossed the border.” Id. at 17–18 (emphasis in original).

The majority opinion acknowledges (but does not reproduce) the “language elided from the district court’s block 

quotation and ours,” but maintains that my reading of Rep. 

Smith’s letter is “inconsistent with [his] comments 

themselves.” Maj. Op. 28 n.10. That is not correct. As 

explained above, Rep. Smith was referring to “arrival” as a 

“process” that begins and continues after an alien has 

crossed the border. Statements Rep. Smith made at the 

congressional hearing in which he submitted his letter only 

confirm what his letter plainly says. See, e.g., 1997 IIRIRA 

Subcomm. Hrg. at 70 (“The problem that I hope you all will 

address when we get to that definition of arriving alien is the 

situation where you have someone crossing a land border 

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perhaps in a vehicle, and as soon as they travel, they’re going 

north or south or east or west; 2 hours later they’re 120 miles 

in the interior. Clearly, they’re still an arriving alien, and 

you somehow need to have a broad enough net to catch those

individuals and apply that definition to them.”).

Rep. Smith’s statement thus provides no support for the 

district court’s unprecedented holding that persons who are 

not in the United States may invoke our asylum laws. 

Because that holding was wrong, the injunction of the Third 

Country Transit Rule upon which it was based should have 

been stayed.

2

Of course, one does not need to agree with anything in 

the preceding section to conclude that the district court’s 

injunction of the Third Country Transit Rule was improper. 

As I have explained, the government correctly argues (and 

the majority seemingly agrees, Maj. Op. 31 n.11) that 

regardless of whether plaintiffs attempted to enter the United 

States prior to July 16, 2019, they would now be arriving 

again after that date, so that the Third Country Transit Rule 

on its face applies to them. The majority therefore 

acknowledges that even if the district court’s “arriving in” 

analysis were correct, the government would still succeed on 

the merits if plaintiffs’ “first arrival” was not the proper 

focus, so that “any second arrival . . . governed by the Rule” 

is the “one that matters.” Maj. Op. 26.

The majority holds that the government has not made a 

sufficient showing in this respect either, on the theory that 

“[i]t is more likely that the first arrival is governed by the 

eligibility requirements at the time the right to be considered 

for asylum arose than that regulations imposed after the fact 

will cancel out the earlier eligibility.” Maj. Op. 33. That is 

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the direct effect of the district court’s injunction as well, 

which ordered the government “to return to the pre-Asylum 

Ban practices for processing the asylum applications of 

members of the certified class.” Al Otro Lado, 2019 WL 

6134601, at *20. This, according to the majority, “makes 

sense.” Maj. Op. 32–33.

This reasoning will drastically destabilize the law at the 

border. What the majority is apparently saying is that 

asylum eligibility rules should be frozen in time as of the 

point that the plaintiffs were first arriving at a port of entry 

(or, more accurately, in the process of arriving there). The 

theory would extend to any change in the law after the 

plaintiffs were first metered. The implications of this rule of 

law are significant. By the logic of the majority’s opinion, 

persons could be metered, deported from Mexico, and then 

return to a United States port of entry many years later, 

demanding that any new developments in immigration law 

not apply to them. Indeed, any person who is “in the 

processing of arriving in” the United States would seemingly 

have a vested right to the eligibility requirements in place as 

of that time. This would atomize the process for applying 

immigration rules of supposed general applicability, with the 

law in constant flux depending upon the person being 

considered for admission. This would cause obvious and 

enormous problems of administration at the border.

The majority’s determination that the Third Country 

Transit Rule should not apply because it was not “in place” 

“at the time each class member’s right to apply for asylum 

attached” (the “first arrival”), Maj. Op. 32–33, also meets 

serious resistance from our cases. We have repeatedly held 

that a change in immigration law may apply to persons much 

farther along in immigration proceedings than the plaintiffs 

are here. As we explained long ago, where a “Petitioner had 

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been eligible for the relief sought when he first applied for 

it” but “became ineligible by virtue of [a] change in the law,” 

“[i]t is settled that when the law is changed before a decision 

is handed down by an administrative agency, the agency 

must apply the new law.” Talanoa v. INS, 397 F.2d 196, 200 

(9th Cir. 1968); see also Vasquez-Zavala v. Ashcroft, 

324 F.3d 1105, 1108 (9th Cir. 2003) (rejecting petitioners’ 

arguments based on allegedly “settled expectations” and 

applying change in law that was made after petitioners filed 

their asylum application); Ortiz v. INS, 179 F.3d 1148, 1156 

(9th Cir. 1999) (holding that new definition of “aggravated 

felony” that took effect after petitioners had filed an asylum 

application applied, and “[t]he fact that the [petitioners’] 

petition for asylum was filed prior to the effective date of the 

IIRIRA does not help them”). In these cases, the new law 

was “not in place” at the relevant time either, Maj. Op. 32–

33, but that did not change the court’s analysis.

To the extent the majority would allow new changes in 

the law to apply to ongoing asylum proceedings, as our 

precedent confirms can occur, the broader statements in the 

majority’s opinion must give way to a more limited holding: 

that when an alien was previously “in the process of 

arriving” in the United States, the Third Country Transit 

Rule does not apply to that person. But that returns us to the 

beginning, namely, that the Third Country Transit Rule does 

not exempt persons who previously attempted to enter the 

country. And nothing in the INA says that when there are 

multiple “arrivals” over time, it is the first one, and not the 

later arrival in front of us (and immigration officials), that 

matters.

The majority would presumably agree that if an alien 

entered the United States prior to July 16, 2019, freely left 

the United States on her own accord, and then returned after 

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July 16, 2019, the Third Country Transit Rule could apply to 

her. That would be so notwithstanding her earlier pre-July 

16, 2019 “arrival.” The majority would likewise seemingly 

agree that if an alien entered the United States prior to July 

16, 2019, was lawfully removed, and then attempted to 

arrive again after July 16, 2019, the Third Country Transit 

Rule could apply to that person too.

Then why is this case different? The only possible 

reason could be that there is something wrong about the 

combination of the government’s metering policies and the 

Third Country Transit Rule, namely, that the government 

turned people away through metering only to then subject 

them to a new asylum eligibility requirement. The district 

court was explicit on this point: it thought the government’s 

metering policies had created a “legal bind” that was “at 

best, misleading, and at worst, duplicitous.” Al Otro Lado, 

2019 WL 6134601, at *1, 11. The majority makes the same 

point, “agree[ing] with the district court that ‘[t]his situation, 

at its core, is quintessentially inequitable.’” Maj. Op. 34–35.

The problem with these statements is that this entire 

injunction—and the majority’s opinion refusing to stay it—

is premised on the assumption that metering is not unlawful. 

Maj. Op. 9, 31 n.11; Al Otro Lado, 2019 WL 6134601, 

at *11, 13. And if metering is lawful, as the district court 

conceded may be the case, then the supposed “legal bind” 

and “quintessentially inequitable” government behavior are 

nothing of the sort, but rather a natural consequence of the 

government’s valid enforcement of the immigration laws. 

This really has now brought us back completely full circle: 

the injunction does not turn on whether metering is lawful. 

The majority and district court therefore cannot then 

smuggle into the analysis an implicit and unproven judgment 

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that metering is wrong. And they certainly cannot do so on 

a classwide basis for all ports of entry at all times.

For all these reasons, the government has shown an 

overwhelming likelihood of success on the merits and the 

first stay factor thus tips decidedly in its favor. I am unsure 

why the majority opinion suggests that I am criticizing what 

the majority views as its “restrained approach.” Maj. Op. 

35. The majority opinion is restrained only insofar as it fails 

to confront the obvious legal deficiencies in the district 

court’s injunction. The majority’s citation of a law review 

article and the dissenting opinion in East Bay 

notwithstanding, see Maj. Op. 36 (citing East Bay, 140 S. Ct. 

at 6 (Sotomayor, J., joined by Ginsburg, J., dissenting), at 

this stage of the process, we not only may consider the 

likelihood of success on the merits, but are required to do so. 

Nken, 556 U.S. at 433–34. We often do so extensively, 

whether a stay is granted or denied. See, e.g., City & Cty. of 

S.F., 944 F.3d at 790–805; Sierra Club v. Trump, 929 F.3d 

670, 688–704 (9th Cir. 2019). That the inquiry at this stage 

is probabilistic, Maj. Op. 35, does not mean we can shy away 

from it.

IV

The second stay factor—irreparable harm—also weighs 

strongly in favor of the government. See Nken, 556 U.S. at 

424. We have previously explained that the harm analysis 

“focuses on irreparability, irrespective of the magnitude of 

the injury.” City & Cty. of S.F., 944 F.3d at 806 (quoting 

California v. Azar, 911 F.3d 558, 581 (9th Cir. 2018)). The 

majority opinion is thus incorrect to insist on a showing of 

“significant irreparable harm.” Maj. Op. 20. That is not the 

governing standard. Here, however, the harm of complying 

with the district court’s injunction is both irreparable and 

significant, requiring a stay of the injunction.

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Although the majority does not mention it, the initial 

harm here is the government’s inability to apply the Third 

Country Transit Rule to persons that the Rule covers, where 

the Supreme Court has already held that this Rule may be 

implemented pending appeal. See East Bay, 140 S. Ct. at 3. 

Citing an exponential increase in persons approaching our 

border and the fact that many asylum claims are later found 

to be “meritless,” the Third Country Transit Rule sought to 

focus the country’s immigration resources on those 

applicants who are more likely to present meritorious asylum 

claims. See 84 Fed. Reg. at 33,839. The district court’s 

injunction thus disallows the government from denying 

asylum on a presently permitted ground. This constitutes an 

irreparable harm. See City & Cty. of S.F., 944 F.3d at 806. 

But in all events, it is not for us to debate whether the 

government’s inability to enforce the Third Country Transit 

Rule creates such harm. The Supreme Court—in staying an 

injunction of that very Rule—has already found that the 

government met its burden on the stay factors. East Bay, 

140 S. Ct. at 3.

The irreparable harm here, however, runs deeper. Under 

the district court’s injunction, the government is obligated to 

identify and treat differently an estimated 26,000 persons 

who were metered during a several-year period at various 

points of entry across our southern border. Many of these 

persons will lack proper documentation. While the Third 

Country Transit Rule may now be applied to everyone else 

entering this country, see East Bay, 140 S. Ct. at 3, officials 

at our already overburdened border will now face the 

additional task of exempting a 26,000-person subclass from 

the Rule.

To hear the majority tell it, this will be straightforward. 

All that is needed are “fairly simple factual determinations.” 

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Maj. Op. 19. The record refutes that characterization. The 

majority opinion turns on the government’s supposed ability 

to rely upon certain lists of metered persons prepared by 

different groups in Mexico, lists the majority says border 

officials could use to identify those persons who had been 

metered prior to July 16, 2019. Id. at 21. The majority goes 

so far as to assert that the government has in fact relied on 

these lists in the past, and that the government’s failure to 

create its own lists of metered aliens is the government’s 

own fault. Id. at 20.

The record does not support these assertions. What the 

record instead reveals is that based on materials that 

plaintiffs themselves have put forward in this litigation—

including expert opinion—the various lists are highly 

unreliable and underinclusive. The government represents 

that it does not view the lists as reliable. Given plaintiffs’ 

own positions on the lists in this litigation, it cannot be that 

the government should be expected to rely upon them in 

complying with the district court’s order.

The district court’s injunction does not require “fairly 

simple factual determinations.” Maj. Op. 19. It instead 

creates an administrative dilemma of the highest order, 

across every port of entry at the United States-Mexico 

border. Although the majority dismisses it as “the 

supposition of some officials,” Maj. Op. 22, the government 

has come forward with the declarations of high-ranking 

immigration personnel attesting to the serious problems of 

administration and delays that the district court’s injunction 

will cause. The majority therefore errs in concluding that the 

government’s showing of irreparable harm is “weak.” Id.

at 24. The record shows that the government has made a 

more than sufficient showing of irreparable harm, 

warranting a stay.

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A

I must first address the majority’s claim that the 

irreparable harm here is “self-inflicted” based on “the 

government’s own failure to keep records of asylum seekers 

who have been metered.” Maj. Op. 20. In the majority’s 

view, “[t]hat the government’s asserted harm is largely selfinflicted ‘severely undermines’ its claim for equitable 

relief.” Id. This position is not justified and improperly 

substitutes the court’s judgment for that of immigration 

officials.

As an initial matter, nothing required the government to 

maintain lists of persons who approached the United States 

border but could not enter due to metering. Neither plaintiffs 

nor the majority cite any statute, regulation, or other 

requirement imposing such a record-keeping obligation. 

When rejecting the argument that plaintiffs’ harm was selfinflicted because class members did not pursue asylum in 

Mexico, the majority holds that “the class members were not 

required to do so.” Maj. Op. 34 n.13. It is unclear why this 

same rationale would not apply to the government’s alleged 

failure to create lists of metered persons, which it was not 

required to do either.

Equally unavailing is the majority’s claim that the 

government’s harm is self-inflicted because it was 

foreseeable. Maj. Op. 20. The chain of events that would 

make this true is far too unlikely. The government would 

have had to presume that its metering practices, dating back 

many years, would be challenged and result in a novel 

decision holding that persons outside the United States could 

claim a violation of our asylum statutes. The government 

would then have had to predict the enactment of the Third 

Country Transit Rule two years into this case. And it would 

then have to envision that the Supreme Court would allow 

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this Rule to go into effect pending appeal, see East Bay, 

140 S. Ct. at 3, but that the Rule could then be partially 

enjoined in a metering lawsuit that does not directly 

challenge it. It is hard to see how this unusual sequence 

could be regarded as foreseeable such that the government 

must now be faulted for failing to prepare lists that it was not 

required to prepare in the first place.

Finally, the majority ignores evidence in the record as to 

the government’s reasons for not creating such lists. As 

Randy Howe, Executive Director for Operations, Office of 

Field Operations, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, has 

explained, CBP officers’ interactions with persons at the 

border line are “not intended to be a detailed encounter; 

memorializing a great deal of information at this time would 

be not only impracticable but potentially dangerous to the 

personnel and the port.” As Mr. Howe explains in greater 

detail,

Personnel at the limit line are in a constant or 

near-constant cycle of encountering dozens 

or hundreds of travelers a day, some of whom 

may be seeking to cause harm or evade the 

law. For these reasons, forcing limit line 

personnel to halt their present duties and 

memorialize the counter, when those 

travelers may or may not need interpretative 

assistance to engage in thorough dialogue, 

including collecting biographical 

information about that individual or family 

unit (along with at least some measure of 

verification), would weaken the operational 

posture of the remainder of the limit line and 

could pose a threat to safety.

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The majority opinion tries to shift responsibility back to 

the government by referencing the fact that at “one [port of 

entry]” “around the end of 2016,” CBP officials were 

instructed to provide aliens with pieces of paper identifying 

appointment times “if possible.” Maj. Op. 19; id. at 11 n.1. 

The record shows that the government ultimately concluded 

that “giving out tickets would just lead to a lot of fake tickets 

and a lot of misuse of [the] system.” The government’s 

official metering guidance thus prohibited the provision of 

any “tickets or appointments” or other means of scheduling 

persons for entry.

The difficulty the government would face in creating 

records of persons approaching the border during periods of 

metering was also exacerbated by evidence in the record of 

large groups of immigrants approaching U.S. ports of entry. 

Plaintiffs’ expert witness claims, for example, that certain 

formal metering guidance was issued in response to “surge 

events,” such as a large group of approximately 1,500 

asylum seekers traveling through Mexico toward the United 

States in 2018. The majority opinion fails to appreciate the 

reality on the ground, which is that documenting large 

volumes of persons during periods of metering would raise 

significant logistical and other issues.

These safety and logistical issues easily distinguish this 

case from the cases the majority cites involving self-inflicted 

harms. In Hirschfeld v. Board of Elections in City of New 

York, 984 F.2d 35 (2d Cir. 1993), the court denied a stay 

because of the applicant’s “inexcusable delay” in seeking it, 

which reflected a “misuse of the judicial process.” Id. at 37–

39. In Second City Music, Inc. v. City of Chicago, 333 F.3d 

846 (7th Cir. 2003), the court denied a stay of a licensing 

requirement because the applicant had not even sought the 

“readily available license” and “would incur no detriment by 

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the act of applying” for it. Id. at 849–50. And in Caplan v. 

Fellheimer Eichen Braverman & Kaskey, 68 F.3d 828 (3d

Cir. 1995), the court held that the defendant law firm seeking 

an injunction could not show irreparable injury from its 

insurer settling a claim, because the law firm had contracted 

with the insurer to do just that. Id. at 839. These cases all 

involved easily foreseeable or readily avoidable harms. And 

none involved situations remotely as dynamic or difficult as 

the United States’ border with Mexico.

B

The majority asserts that because the government 

supposedly “relied on [the waitlists] to facilitate the metering 

policy,” “[n]o reason appears why the lists are adequate for 

those purposes but must be entirely disregarded in 

identifying who came to the border when for purposes of 

complying with the district court’s injunction.” Maj. Op. 

21–22. The record does not support either conclusion.

It is not accurate to claim, as the majority does, that “the 

record establishes that the government has been using [the 

waitlists] in determining the order in which applicants for 

asylum are allowed to enter, submit their asylum 

applications, and undergo credible fear interviews.” Maj. 

Op. 21–22 (emphasis added). For this proposition the 

majority cites the report of plaintiffs’ expert witness, 

Stephanie Leutert. But the relevant portions of that report, 

which may be found at pages ER 996–1001 of plaintiffs’ 

excerpts of record, do not support the majority’s statement.

After discussing metering practices generally and the 

creation of certain lists in Mexico, Ms. Leutert states that

Once asylum seekers get on a waitlist, they 

have to wait until their number is called. 

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Every day, a CBP official communicates the 

number of people that they will receive that 

day to an individual in Mexico. This exact 

process depends on the port of entry and the 

waitlist structure in each Mexican city. 

According to list managers in cities such as 

Ciudad Juárez, Ciudad Acuña, and Piedras 

Negras, CBP officers directly call the 

Mexican individuals who manage the lists.

As this passage shows, Ms. Leutert’s report does not say that 

the government is relying upon the waitlists themselves (and 

certainly not all of them), but rather that when capacity frees 

up at a port of entry, CBP will contact some of the persons 

who allegedly manage the lists to let them know. The 

Leutert report also does not suggest, as the majority claims, 

that the government has been using the waitlists “in 

determining the order in which applications for asylum are 

allowed to enter.” Maj. Op. 21–22 (emphasis added). 

Ms. Leutert offers no opinion as to whether CBP is relying 

upon persons managing the waitlists to provide names in a 

particular order. And there would be obvious questions 

whether Ms. Leutert would even have a basis to offer such 

an opinion, particularly across the many different ports of 

entry.

The majority also states that “[t]he district court 

concluded that ‘CBP relied on these lists to facilitate the 

process of metering,’ and the record supports this 

conclusion.” Maj. Op. 11–12 (quoting Al Otro Lado, 2019 

WL 6134601, at *15). What the district court relied upon 

for this statement, and what the majority relies upon as well, 

are the declarations of Nicole Ramos of Al Otro Lado and 

J.R., an asylum-seeker from Cuba. Id. at 10. The majority 

provides no explanation as to why an employee of Al Otro 

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Lado or a person seeking entry into this country can be the 

authority on what CBP does or does not rely upon. But even 

so, these declarations on their face do not support the notion 

that CBP has broadly relied on lists of metered persons that 

various outside groups have generated, or that it has relied 

on these lists to sequence entry of persons in any particular 

order.

Ms. Ramos, Al Otro Lado’s Border Rights Project 

Director, states only that Grupo Beta maintains a list and that 

“CBP communicates its daily capacity to Grupo Beta, which 

uses that information to call the appropriate numbers from 

the top of the list.” Ms. Ramos is here referring to only one 

group (Grupo Beta, a Mexican governmental entity) for one 

port of entry (Tijuana). Her declaration thus does not 

support the majority’s description of what CBP supposedly 

does “[a]t each” port of entry. Maj. Op. 11. Nor does it 

support the majority’s suggestion that CBP’s purpose in 

contacting Grupo Beta was to receive asylum seekers in a 

certain order. Once again, that CBP would contact Grupo 

Beta to let it know about capacity at a border station is not 

the same as CBP relying upon the accuracy or ordering of 

Grupo Beta’s list—a list that Ms. Ramos herself says was 

subject to “corruption,” a point I will discuss further below.

J.R.’s declaration likewise does not support the majority. 

J.R. is a Cuban citizen who sought to enter the United States 

at Brownsville, Texas and was put on a waitlist. According 

to J.R., “[t]he list was controlled by Mexican immigration 

officials, and they were in touch with U.S. officials who 

would ask every day for a certain number of people to 

present themselves at the U.S. offices.” J.R.’s declaration is 

limited to one port of entry and also does not support the 

majority’s position that CBP “has been using [the waitlists] 

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in determining the order in which applicants for asylum are 

allowed to enter.” Maj. Op. 21–22.

Nor is it correct, as the majority opinion states, that 

through the use of the “terms” “metering and queue 

management,” the “government recognized” and 

“impl[ied]” “the practical need to identify which applicants 

had appeared at the border and in what order.” Maj. Op. 21. 

This point has little to do with whether the government 

previously relied upon waitlists that others generated. But 

even so, the terms “metering” and “queue management” do 

not have the implication that the majority suggests. To the 

contrary, government witnesses have explained that 

metering was not a “scheduling system,” but a means of 

“controlling the flow based on our operation.”

The upshot is that the government’s ability to comply 

with the injunction without irreparable harm cannot depend 

upon what the government has already done (supposed 

reliance on the lists) or not done (alleged self-inflicted 

failure to create its own lists). Instead, it must turn on 

whether the lists are themselves capable of being used to 

comply with the district court’s order. I turn now to that 

issue.

C

Can waitlists that various groups in Mexico prepared be 

used to separate out the 26,000 class members from all other 

asylum seekers who would otherwise be subject to the Third 

Country Transit Rule? On this critical point, the majority 

says very little. It acknowledges that the lists are “not 

entirely reliable,” but says there is no reason why the lists 

“must be entirely disregarded in identifying who came to the 

border when for purposes of complying with the district 

court’s injunction.” Maj. Op. 21–22. But the question is not 

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whether the lists should be “entirely disregarded.” It is 

whether the lists can be relied upon to any meaningful 

extent, so that the government would not be put to a 

significant burden of determining whether each asylum 

applicant is a class member. The record does not support the 

majority’s apparent theory that the government can easily 

comply with the district court’s injunction by relying upon 

the waitlists.

I conclude this based on materials that plaintiffs 

themselves have put forward, in an evident effort to support 

their underlying claims about metering. This includes, but 

is not limited to, the expert report of Stephanie Leutert, the 

Director of the Central America & Mexico Policy Initiative 

at the Strauss Center for International Security and Law at 

the University of Texas. The point here is not to credit any 

particular evidence, but to show that the government should 

not be expected to rely upon the various lists when plaintiffs 

in this case have sharply impugned the integrity of those very 

lists.

At the outset, it is important to recognize that there is no 

single waitlist, but many different waitlists in many different 

locations along the Mexico border. This begins to show 

some of the serious problems with using the lists to comply 

with the district court’s injunction. According to plaintiffs’ 

expert, Ms. Leutert, waitlists are “in place in every city with 

waiting asylum seekers.” Ms. Leutert formally identifies as 

of November 2019 twenty-two such waitlists, which were in 

place in eleven different border locations. According to her 

report, some areas have more than one list. Nuevo Laredo, 

opposite Laredo, Texas, has six different lists. Brownsville 

has three.

According to Ms. Leutert, lists are maintained by a 

variety of different groups, such as “the asylum seekers 

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themselves, Mexican government officials, or humanitarian 

workers.” The details vary in every location. For example, 

a Strauss Center report upon which plaintiffs and Ms. Leutert 

rely indicates that in Nuevo Laredo, six different shelters 

each operate their own list, with “[t]he shelters select[ing] 

which asylum seekers will cross” into the United States. In 

Tijuana, the list operating as of July 16, 2019 was a physical 

notebook containing tens of thousands of names, with 

asylum seekers themselves serving as “list managers.” In 

Reynosa, Mexico, and again based on the same report, 

approximately 3,600 asylum seekers are organized into 

different lists for single men, single women, families, and 

pregnant women.

As a result, and contrary to the apparent assumption in 

the majority’s opinion, according to Ms. Leutert, the 

“asylum waitlists have no standardized procedure or 

structure,” and “there is no standardized Mexican or U.S. 

regulation of the asylum waitlists nor their managers.” That 

is the case even as to lists that the Mexican government 

maintains. Ms. Leutert reports that “[d]espite Mexican 

government entities managing the lists in certain cities, there 

does not appear to be any standardized guidance,” which “is 

evidenced by the different list formats and processes in 

different cities even when the same federal government 

agency is running the asylum waitlist.” The majority does 

not explain whether any or all of the different waitlists would 

indicate when a person was metered, much less reliably so 

across every border location.

Equally problematic, plaintiffs maintain that for many 

different reasons the waitlists are underinclusive of persons 

who were metered. A December 2018 Strauss Center 

report—which lists Ms. Leutert as the lead author—notes 

that various lists were not enacted until the summer of 2018, 

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and so would evidently not capture persons metered before 

then. In addition, according to Ms. Leutert, “the lack of 

regulations means that some cities can stop asylum seekers 

from joining waitlists altogether.” In a border town opposite 

Del Rio, Texas, for example, “the asylum waitlists for both 

individuals and families have been ‘closed’ since March 

2019.” There are other reasons the lists are underinclusive 

as well. An August 2019 Strauss Center report (upon which 

Ms. Leutert also relies) describes that in Matamoros, 

Mexico, “there have been reports that asylum seekers who 

lack documentation and legal status in Mexico are being 

barred from signing up on the list, and are instead being 

deported.” There are other similar examples in the record 

involving other border locations.

Plaintiffs further put forward evidence that the lists are 

underinclusive for more malign reasons. Ms. Leutert reports 

that there are “no controls to guarantee that these waitlists 

are being run transparently or without corruption,” and that 

corruption is an issue. Ms. Leutert recounts that “some list 

managers charge asylum seekers to get on the asylum 

waitlist, including in Piedras Negas, Reynosa, and 

Matamoros.” Ms. Leutert also relies upon a news article 

reporting that when an individual in Tijuana misses his 

number being called, the individual may be reassigned a new 

number at the end of the line. Her expert report also recounts 

allegations in Tijuana “that black asylum seekers were at 

times excluded from waitlists, and as such would not be 

counted.”

A declaration from Nicole Ramos, Al Otro Lado’s 

Border Rights Director, gives deeper insight into some of 

these issues in Tijuana, where Grupo Beta runs the list. As 

with Ms. Leutert’s expert report, the plaintiffs relied upon 

Ms. Ramos’ declaration in seeking the injunction at issue. 

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The majority also specifically references Grupo Beta’s 

“‘formalized list,’” thereby suggesting it is reliable. Maj. 

Op. 11. But Ms. Ramos’ declaration tells a different story.

An entire heading in Ms. Ramos’ declaration is that “The 

Waitlist in Tijuana, Mexico is Underinclusive.” Grupo 

Beta’s rules “require that each asylum seeker present 

identification, which has prevented asylum seekers who lack 

identification from being added to the list.” Ms. Ramos 

reports that these requirements “disproportionately affect 

Black migrants,” who are less likely to possess identifying 

documents. Like Ms. Leutert, Ms. Ramos cites “numerous 

reports of corruption of the list administered by Grupo Beta,” 

including “several asylum seekers who paid to have their 

names added to the list while still in South America.”

Given everything plaintiffs have said about the various 

lists, it is difficult to understand why the government should 

now be expected to rely upon them, particularly for purposes 

of complying with a court order. A declaration from Ashley 

Caudill-Mirillo, the Deputy Chief of the Asylum Division 

with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) 

who “oversee[s] all Asylum Offices nationwide,” explains 

that “[e]ven if USCIS had access to any lists[] purportedly 

maintained by shelters or otherwise,” “USCIS has no 

definitive way to verify the accuracy or authenticity of any 

such lists.” As a result, Ms. Caudill-Mirillo attests, “asylum 

officers would still need to question the interviewees to 

assess the veracity of any documentation provided and 

determine whether or not they are class members.”

The Supreme Court has reminded us that “[t]he 

Government’s interest in preventing the entry of unwanted 

persons and effects is at its zenith at the international 

border.” United States v. Flores-Montano, 541 U.S. 149, 

152 (2004). The government personnel in charge of 

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managing our borders and maintaining their safety are surely 

due some degree of deference on the operational issue of 

whether certain lists are reliable for determining if asylum 

seekers were metered prior to July 16, 2019. See, e.g., 

Tabbaa v. Chertoff, 509 F.3d 89, 106 (2d Cir. 2007) 

(“[S]ome measure of deference is owed to CBP due to its 

considered expertise in carrying out its mission of protecting 

the border.”).

The lists may be the product of well-meaning efforts to 

help those in need, or the unfortunate result of persons taking 

advantage of the downtrodden. But given plaintiffs’ own 

positions on the various lists, I am hard-pressed to 

understand how the majority can conclude that the 

government can be expected to use them, so that its burden 

in complying with the district court’s injunction would be 

minimal.

D

With the lists unable to ease the government’s burden, 

the enormity of the government’s task in complying with the 

district court’s injunction pending appeal reveals itself in 

stark relief. Just this Term, the Supreme Court reiterated that 

patrolling our border with Mexico is “a daunting task.” 

Hernandez v. Mesa, No. 17-1678, slip op. at 11 (S. Ct. Feb. 

25, 2020). Today’s decision makes this work only more 

daunting.

Immigration officials at an already overburdened border 

must now somehow identify the 26,000 persons among the 

easily hundreds of thousands more who, per a court order, 

cannot be subject to the Third Country Transit Rule. CBP 

officers must determine those asylum seekers who 

previously approached a port of entry and were turned away 

due to metering, a practice that took place over a period of 

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years and at many different entry locations. Immigration 

officers will have to make these determinations without 

reliable records of who previously approached border limit 

lines or when they may have done so. And officials must 

undertake this effort at every United States port of entry 

across the southern border, as to persons who frequently lack 

proper documentation and who speak a diversity of 

languages. As CBP’s Randy Howe explains, “[w]ere any 

individual to come forward and assert that they had been 

encountered at the limit line, CBP would have no way to 

either confirm or refute that individual’s own statements.”

The result is that as immigration officials inspect people 

every day in locations from San Diego to Brownsville, they 

will have to undertake an entirely new and unfamiliar 

inquiry to determine if persons were previously metered. 

The government has submitted declarations from highranking immigration personnel attesting to the serious 

problems this will create at the border. This includes CBP’s 

Mr. Howe, who oversees 23,000 immigration employees at 

20 major field offices and 328 U.S. ports of entry. Based on 

his three decades of service in our country’s immigration 

system, Mr. Howe explains that based on the lack of 

documentation, “there is no way for CBP to determine who 

may or may not have been encountered at the limit line 

historically. Indeed, there is no way to even calculate, with 

any degree of accuracy, how many individuals have been 

encountered in the limit line.”

A declaration from Ashley Caudill-Mirillo, the USCIS 

official who oversees all Asylum Offices across the country, 

gives color to what immigration officers on the ground will 

need to do to even attempt to comply with the injunction. 

CBP officers at the border will be required to question 

asylum applicants to determine if they are members of the 

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26,000-person subclass. Ms. Caudill-Mirillo explains that 

this additional questioning will lengthen credible fear 

interviews, which in turn reduces the number of interviews 

that can be conducted, prolonging wait times at the border. 

Some applicants are likely to reschedule their interviews to 

obtain proof of past metering, and their interview slots may 

go then go unfilled. Because “[m]ost individuals are 

detained throughout the credible fear process,” longer 

processing times will lead to longer periods of detention in 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or CBP 

custody.

Ms. Caudill-Mirillo further explains how additional 

problems arise when it comes to persons who already went 

through credible fear screening interviews, where the Third 

Country Transit Rule was applied but where the person has 

not yet been removed from the United States. In 

coordination with ICE, detained persons would need to be 

identified and then re-interviewed to determine if they are 

class members. If persons turn out to be class members, the 

credible fear interview process would need to be conducted 

anew. Ms. Caudill-Mirillo reports that USCIS in 2019 

received over 100,000 credible fear referrals. Complying 

with the district court’s injunction as to persons who had 

already gone through this process would only add to the 

irreparable harm.

The irreparable harm would extend to proceedings 

before immigration judges. As a separate declaration from 

Assistant Chief Immigration Judge Sirce Owen explains, if 

USCIS goes through the above-described process and issues 

a new negative credible fear determination, the applicant 

“will again be entitled to immigration judge review.”

Immigration judges will then be tasked with evaluating the 

applicant’s membership in the subclass and conducting 

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further reviews of credible fear determinations. The bottom 

line is that as the government’s declarations amply 

demonstrate, the district court’s injunction will have a 

domino effect at the border, imposing new and difficult 

requirements on an immigration system that is constantly 

struggling to keep up.

I disagree with the majority’s refusal to recognize the 

irreparable harms that the government’s declarations make 

plain, and which resonate based on any reasonable 

understanding of how our immigration process works. To 

cast off the declarations as the mere “supposition of some 

officials,” as the majority does, Maj. Op. 22, fails to 

acknowledge that the government’s declarants are highranking persons with a collective decades of experience 

dealing with some of the most intractable problems at our 

border. “[G]overnance of immigration and alien status is 

extensive and complex,” and trained immigration officials 

play a “major role” in “determining the admissibility of 

aliens and securing the country’s borders.” Arizona v. 

United States, 567 U.S. 387, 395, 397 (2012). I therefore 

believe the views of the government declarants in this case 

should not be so lightly cast aside. See Winter v. Nat. Res. 

Def. Council, Inc., 555 U.S. 7, 24, 27 (2008).

Nor is there anything wrong or insufficient in this 

context with declarations that set forth the anticipated effect 

of an injunction. See id. at 28 (“The lower courts failed 

properly to defer to senior Navy officers’ specific, predictive 

judgments about how the preliminary injunction would 

reduce the effectiveness of the Navy’s SOCAL training 

exercises.”). To minimize the government’s declarations as 

setting forth only “guesses concerning the likely burden of 

ascertaining class membership,” as the majority does, does 

not seem at all fair. Maj. Op. 21–22. The majority does not 

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question the declarants’ qualifications or their explanation 

for how the district court’s injunction will generally affect 

processes at the border. The declarations are not based on 

guesswork, but the informed views of experienced personnel 

who set forth a valid and detailed basis for their stated 

concerns.

I also do not find persuasive the majority’s quibbles with 

the government declarants’ time estimates for the additional 

questioning of asylum applicants that the district court’s 

injunction will necessitate. See Maj. Op. 19–20, 21–22. I 

find it difficult to substitute our judgment on such 

operational issues for that of immigration officials who have 

a greater on-the-ground understanding of how much time 

particular lines of questioning in asylum interviews will 

take. But the debate over minutes is not a helpful one, 

because it cannot be denied that the district court’s 

injunction will require immigration officials to conduct an 

entirely new line of inquiry to reach an entirely new type of 

determination about past metering.

The majority notes that in one asylum interview, USCIS 

was able quickly to determine that the applicant was not a 

subclass member. Maj. Op. 22 & n.8. But in that case, the 

applicant clearly stated that he had not tried to enter the 

United States prior to October 2019, and so by his own 

admission was not a member of the class. Id. at 22. As the 

majority acknowledges with considerable understatement, 

“[m]ore time may be needed to establish that someone who 

claims to be a member of the class actually is.” Id. Once it 

becomes widely known that persons can avoid the Third 

Country Transit Rule if they can claim they were metered 

prior to July 16, 2019, one can expect many people to claim 

class membership during their asylum interviews. Whether 

or not these assertions would be bona fide, the point is that 

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they will take time for immigration officials to review and 

verify, at a substantial cost to the overall system.

The majority does not dispute that frustrating the 

government’s ability to process persons at the border can 

create irreparable harm. See, e.g., Innovation Law Lab, 

924 F.3d at 510. Indeed, we previously granted an 

administrative stay in this case because “[p]rohibiting the 

government from applying [the Third Country Transit Rule] 

to the proposed class members could cause complications at 

the border.” Al Otro Lado v. Wolf, 945 F.3d at 1224. Now, 

the majority claims that this case is akin to Hernandez v. 

Sessions, 872 F.3d 976 (9th 2017). Maj. Op. 20. The 

comparison to Hernandez, however, is inapt.

In Hernandez, we held that a district court did not abuse 

its discretion in entering an injunction that required 

immigration officials to consider a non-citizen’s financial 

circumstances in setting the amount of bond. Hernandez, 

872 F.3d at 982–83. We determined that the government had 

not demonstrated irreparable harm because the government 

already had discretion to consider a non-citizen’s financial 

circumstances, and therefore “the district court’s injunction 

imposes only a minor change on the preexisting bond 

determination process.” Id. at 995. Considering these 

financial circumstances was also “not overly complicated or 

complex.” Id. (quotations omitted).

As this description of the case shows, the majority is not 

correct that the asserted diversion of resources in this case 

“is no more persuasive as significant irreparable harm than 

it was in Hernandez.” Maj. Op. 20. Suffice to say, requiring 

the government to identify 26,000 persons at the southern 

border who were previously metered at numerous ports of 

entry over a period of years is considerably more 

complicated and burdensome than requiring the government 

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to consider a non-citizen’s financial circumstances during 

bond hearings. Hernandez, unlike here, also did not involve 

an injunction that imposed collateral consequences on other 

aspects of the immigration system.

There is a recognized immigration crisis at our southern 

border. City & Cty. of S.F., 944 F.3d at 808 (Bybee, J., 

concurring); East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, 932 F.3d at 774. 

Hernandez did not implicate it; this case does. The 

government has demonstrated that complying with the 

district court’s injunction will create irreparable harm.

V

The final stay factors are “whether issuance of the stay 

will substantially injure the other parties interested in the 

proceeding” and “where the public interest lies.” Nken, 

556 U.S. at 434. For the same reasons I have already set 

forth above, these factors favor the government. See also 

Landon v. Plasencia, 459 U.S. 21, 34 (1982) (“The 

government’s interest in efficient administration of the 

immigration laws at the border is also weighty.”).

The majority concludes otherwise based on harms 

plaintiffs claim they will experience from the Third Country 

Transit Rule and metering. Maj. Op. 34–35. But the validity 

of the Third Country Transit Rule is not at issue here, and 

the same arguments plaintiffs now make about the harm this 

Rule allegedly causes were also made in East Bay, where the 

Supreme Court stayed the injunction and allowed the Rule 

to go into effect. With respect to metering, the majority 

repeats the point that the combination of metering and the 

Third Country Transit Rule creates a “‘quintessentially 

inequitable’” situation. Maj. Op. 35. But the problem once 

again is that there has been no determination that metering is 

unlawful.

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In a similar vein, the majority endorses the district 

court’s view that class members “relied to their detriment on 

the government’s representations,” because class members 

“‘returned to Mexico reasonably believing that if they 

followed these procedures, they would eventually have the 

opportunity to make a claim for asylum in the United 

States.’” Maj. Op. at 34 (quoting Al Otro Lado, 2019 WL 

6134601, at *19). But there is no indication that the 

government informed persons who were metered that their 

asylum applications would be adjudged under the law that 

existed at the time of metering. The district court’s analysis 

on this point again assumes that metering is invalid. The 

injunction cannot be justified on that basis.

* * *

When the Supreme Court allows an immigration rule to 

go into effect nationwide pending appeal, it is not for 

litigants or lower courts to find creative and legally 

unjustified ways to circumvent that ruling. The problems at 

our border are undeniable, but the policy issues they raise are 

committed to other branches of our government. Our review 

is limited to evaluating immigration rules under law. And in 

this case, the district court’s injunction was wrong as a 

matter of law. Because the injunction works a radical and 

improper expansion of our asylum laws and will create 

irreparable harm at a border that is already under great strain, 

the injunction should have been stayed pending appeal. I 

respectfully dissent.

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