Here is a link to the actual court decision if you wisely do not take the OP/RedState as a credible source:
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.344869/gov.uscourts.cand.344869.73.0.pdf
You can read the decision itself for information on why the holding and arguments are not the same as the previous one.
IV. DISCUSSION
The Court previously found that the Organizations had “established a sufficient likelihood of irreparable harm through ‘diversion of resources and the non-speculative loss of substantial funding from other sources.’” East Bay IV, 385 F. Supp. 3d at 957-58 (citing East Bay III, 354 F. Supp. 3d at 1116). The question now before the Court is whether those harms can be addressed by any relief short of a nationwide injunction. The answer is that they cannot.
A. A Nationwide Injunction Is Necessary to Provide Complete Relief
The primary reason a nationwide injunction is appropriate is that it is the only means of affording complete relief to the Organizations. As one commentator has observed, the principle that “injunctive relief should be no more burdensome to the defendant than necessary to provide complete relief to the plaintiffs,” Califano, 422 U.S. at 702, “suggests that when a national injunction is needed for complete relief a court should award one,” Samuel L. Bray, Multiple Chancellors: Reforming the National Injunction, 131 Harv. L. Rev. 417, 466 (2017) (emphasis in original). And as the Supreme Court has observed in analogous circumstances, “the scope of injunctive relief is dictated by the extent of the violation established, not by the geographical extent of the plaintiff class.” Califano, 442 U.S. at 702. Accordingly, “[the Ninth Circuit has] upheld nationwide injunctions where such breadth was necessary to remedy a plaintiff’s harm.” East Bay V, 2019 WL 3850928, at *2.
Bresgal v. Brock provides an example. Plaintiffs in that case were the Northwest Forest Workers Association and individual migrant agricultural workers who worked in forestry on a seasonal basis. Bresgal, 843 F.2d at 1165. They sought, and the district court granted, a declaratory judgment that the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Workers Protection Act applied to forestry workers and an injunction requiring the Secretary of Labor to enforce the Act in the industry. Id. The Ninth Circuit affirmed the nationwide scope of the injunction, even though it would impact labor contractors who were not parties to the suit, including contractors located outside the Ninth Circuit. Id. at 1171. The court concluded that a nationwide scope was necessary to provide the plaintiffs complete relief because “[m]igrant laborers who are parties to this suit may be involved with contractors whose operations are concentrated elsewhere. Similarly, these plaintiffs, as migrant laborers, may travel to forestry jobs in other parts of the country under the supervision of labor contractors.” Id. See also Texas v. United States, 787 F.3d 733, 769 (5th Cir. 2015) (refusing to narrow preliminary injunction of Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) to Texas or the plaintiff states due to “a substantial likelihood that a partial injunction would be ineffective because DAPA beneficiaries would be free to move between states”); Easyriders Freedom F.I.G.H.T. v. Hannigan, 92 F.3d 1486, 1501-02 (9th Cir. 1996) (upholding statewide injunction where 14 named plaintiffs were spread across four counties because “plaintiffs would not receive the complete relief to which they are entitled without statewide application of the injunction”).
By contrast, a district court abuses its discretion when it grants a geographically broader injunction than is necessary to prevent a plaintiff’s injury. In Azar, for example, five plaintiff states challenged the federal government’s implementation of two interim final rules exempting employers with religious and moral objections from the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage requirement. 911 F.3d at 566. The states claimed that enforcement of the rules would cause them economic harm by forcing them to pay for contraceptive care for women whose employers would otherwise cover it. Id. at 571, 581. The record established that enjoining implementation of the rules within the plaintiff states would prevent this harm, but “it was not developed as to the economic impact on other states.” Id. at 584. Because a narrower injunction “would provide complete relief” to the plaintiff states, the court held that the district court abused its discretion by enjoining the rules nationwide. Id. See also City & Cty. of San Francisco, 897 F.3d at 1244 (remanding to the district court for reexamination of the nationwide scope of a permanent injunction where plaintiff counties’ “tendered evidence [wa]s limited to the effect of the [executive order] on their governments and the State of California”).
The circumstances here are much more like those in Bresgal than those in Azar. Some of the plaintiff Organizations serve clients within and outside of the Ninth Circuit. In addition to representing individuals seeking asylum, three of the organizations serve individuals who are not retained clients by, for example, offering asylum law training for pro bono lawyers and pro se asylum workshops for immigrants. ECF No. 67 at 8-9, 11; ECF No. 3-2 ¶ 7. Under the current bifurcated asylum regime, at least two of the Organizations must expend significant resources determining which of their clients are subject to which regime and adjusting their legal services accordingly, as well as revising centralized resources to reflect the complicated landscape of the limited injunction. A nationwide injunction is thus necessary to provide complete relief from the diversion of resources harms the Court identified in its order granting the first preliminary injunction. East Bay IV, 385 F. Supp. 3d at 957. A discussion of two of the plaintiffs’ circumstances makes this point. Plaintiff Innovation Law Lab (“Law Lab”) is a nonprofit focused on “improv[ing] the legal rights of immigrants and refugees in the United States.” ECF No. 3-4 ¶ 2. Law Lab has offices in California, Oregon, Missouri, Texas, and Georgia. ECF No. 57-2 ¶ 4. Law Lab offers workshops and support to noncitizens and pro bono attorneys in Georgia, Kansas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Oregon, as well as to legal service providers at immigrant detention centers throughout the country. Id. ¶ 5. Law Lab can offer such a geographically diverse set of services partly thanks to template materials it has developed to assist asylum seekers. Id. ¶ 7. Law Lab also directly represents persons applying for asylum inside and outside the Ninth Circuit. Id. ¶ 5. While many of these clients cross the border in the Ninth Circuit, they “move between jurisdictions throughout the lifetime of their asylum case.” Id. ¶ 16.
Law Lab will suffer a variety of harms if the third country transit bar goes into effect outside the Ninth Circuit. For example, it will have to redesign its workshops and templates and “devote significant time to re-training . . . volunteers on the new standards and how to screen for attendees who might be subject to the ban.” Id. ¶¶ 7, 9. Its direct representation work will “become significantly more complicated and burdensome.” Id. ¶ 15. Implementation of the Rule outside the Ninth Circuit would also adversely impact Law Lab’s work within the Ninth Circuit by diverting resources to clients who are subject to the Rule. Id. ¶ 17. Because these clients will no longer be eligible for asylum, they will instead have to apply for withholding of removal or relief under the Convention Against Torture (“CAT”), which “have a higher standard of proof than asylum, do not allow for derivative applications, and are more time-consuming cases to handle.” ECF No. 3-4 ¶ 17. As a result, Law Lab would be “forced to serve fewer people overall because of the increased time burden required for a subset of cases.” ECF No. 57-2 ¶ 17.
Plaintiff Al Otro Lado is a nonprofit whose mission is, in part, “to provide screening, advocacy, and legal representation for individuals in asylum and other immigration proceedings.” ECF No. 3-3 ¶ 4. Al Otro Lado is based in California as well as Tijuana, Mexico. Id. ¶¶ 4, 8. It offers “legal orientation workshops” at its Tijuana office, “providing information about the U.S. asylum system to migrants who wish to seek asylum in the United States.” Id. ¶ 5. Al Otro Lado “recruits and trains volunteers and pro bono attorneys” to assist with these workshops. Id. ¶ 6. A number of Al Otro Lado’s clients end up crossing the border in Texas or New Mexico or later relocate (or are detained) outside the Ninth Circuit. ECF No. 57-4 ¶ 5. As a result, “t is impossible for Al Otro Lado to know with certainty ex ante where a given asylum seeker whom [Al Otro Lado] serve prior to their entry will ultimately enter the United States, or where they will end up once they are in the United States, or where a given asylum seeker whom [Al Otro Lado] serve while in detention will end up if released from custody.” Id. ¶ 8. If the injunction is limited to the Ninth Circuit, it will force Al Otro Lado to provide a much broader range of advice to pre-entry asylum seekers to account for different outcomes based on where they choose to enter the country and travel within it. Id. at ¶ 9. This will require the expenditure of “significant organizational resources regarding training materials, staff time, resources, and capacity . . . .” Id.; see also ECF No. 67 at 11.7
Defendants do not dispute this evidence or engage with the applicable law. Instead, they devote much of their argument to focusing on the lack of harm to identified asylum seekers. See, e.g., ECF No. 65 at 7 (“Yet, despite multiple opportunities, Plaintiffs’ counsel does not identify a single, bona fide client who suffers injury as a result of the rule, or explain how an injunction limited to such aliens would not cure their alleged injuries while this litigation proceeds.”). But this is a strawman – the harm to the Organizations, not their potential clients, was the focus of the Court’s injunction. See East Bay IV, 385 F. Supp. 3d at 957 (“Here, the Organizations have again established a sufficient likelihood of irreparable harm through diversion of resources and the nonspeculative loss of substantial funding from other sources.”) (citation and quotation marks omitted). And, rather than dispute that harm, Defendants disagree with Ninth Circuit law on organizational standing, see ECF No. 28 at 16 n.1; East Bay IV, 385 F. Supp. 3d at 937, and repeat their contention from earlier phases of this litigation that the organizational harms Plaintiffs allege are speculative, see ECF No. 65 at 23; ECF 28 at 32.8 These issues have already been decided.
The Organizations have presented sufficient evidence that they will suffer organizational and diversion of resources harms unless the Rule is enjoined outside of, as well as within, the Ninth Circuit.9 A nationwide injunction is thus “necessary to give prevailing parties the relief to which they are entitled.” City & Cty. of San Francisco, 897 F.3d at 1244 (quoting Bresgal, 843 F.2d at 1170-71) (internal quotation marks omitted).
B. Additional Factors Supporting a Nationwide Injunction
The need to provide complete relief to the Plaintiffs, standing alone, is sufficient reason for the re-issuance of the nationwide injunction. In addition to that factor, however, three other factors support such relief. First, a nationwide injunction is supported by the need to maintain uniform immigration policy. See East Bay II, 932 F.3d at 779 (collecting cases and stating that “n immigration matters, we have consistently recognized the authority of district courts to enjoin unlawful policies on a universal basis”); Regents of the Univ. of Cal., 908 F.3d at 511 (affirming nationwide injunction against the government’s rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program based in part on “the need for uniformity in immigration policy”). While this factor may not, by itself, support the issuance of a nationwide injunction, it weighs in its favor. Second, nationwide relief is supported by the text of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which requires the “reviewing court,” “[t]o the extent necessary and when presented,” to “hold unlawful and set aside agency action, findings, and conclusions” found to be “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law . . . .” 5 U.S.C. § 706. The Ninth Circuit has cited this language in upholding a nationwide injunction of regulations that conflicted with the governing statute. Earth Island Inst. v. Ruthenbeck, 490 F.3d 687, 699 (9th Cir. 2007), aff’d in part, rev’d in part on other grounds sub nom. Summers v. Earth Island Inst., 555 U.S. 488 (2009); see also Regents of the Univ. of Cal., 908 F.3d at 511 (“In [the APA] context, ‘[w]hen a reviewing court determines that agency regulations are unlawful, the ordinary result is that the rules are vacated – not that their application to the individual petitioners is proscribed.’”) (quoting Nat’l Min. Ass’n v. U.S. Army Corps of Eng’rs, 145 F.3d 1399, 1409 (D.C. Cir. 1998)). 10
Lastly, anything but a nationwide injunction will create major administrability issues. Although the Government’s recently-issued guidance with regard to the Rule is intended to allow the Court’s injunction to be applied within the Ninth Circuit, problems in administration would remain. For one thing, ambiguities within the guidance documents will lead to uneven enforcement. See ECF No. 67 at 12 (comparing the Government’s description of the injunction as covering those “whose adjudications and proceedings occur in the Ninth [C]ircuit” to the EOIR Guidance’s instruction that the Rule does not apply to those whose “interview or adjudication” occurs in the Ninth Circuit). For another, it is not clear what effect the guidance will have on an asylum applicant who transits between circuits. For example, an applicant who crosses the border and has a credible fear interview outside the Ninth Circuit would, in the absence of a nationwide injunction, be subject to the Rule and thus (barring an exception) eligible only for withholding of removal or CAT. Id. If that individual’s removal proceedings were later moved to the Ninth Circuit, it is unclear whether the immigration judge would be bound by the original denial of credible fear or, since the Rule is enjoined within the Ninth Circuit, able to allow the individual to apply for asylum.
CONCLUSION
While nationwide injunctions are not the “general rule,” they are appropriate “where such breadth [is] necessary to remedy a plaintiff’s harm.” East Bay V, 2019 WL 3850928, at *2. This is such a case. Accordingly, and for the reasons set forth above, the Court grants the Organizations’ motion to restore the nationwide scope of the injunction.
