Organizational Injury Standing

In United States v. Texas, the en banc Fifth Circuit vacated a preliminary injunction against Texas Senate Bill 4 (a state law criminalizing illegal entry and reentry into Texas) because the plaintiffs lacked standing.

The majority opinion held that none of the plaintiffs—two nonprofit legal-services organizations and a Texas county—had suffered a cognizable injury. The majority emphasized that S.B. 4 is enforceable only against noncitizens who are illegally present in Texas, not against advocacy organizations or local governments, and that because the plaintiffs challenge “an alleged ‘unlawful regulation of someone else,’ standing is ‘substantially more difficult’ to establish.”

Relying heavily on the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the majority reasoned that an organization cannot “spend its way into standing” or “manufacture its own standing” by voluntarily incurring costs to counteract a policy it opposes. The majority acknowledged that the Supreme Court’s decision in Havens Realty Corp. v. Coleman recognized organizational standing in a specific factual context—where a housing counseling organization was directly harmed by a defendant’s false representations—but concluded that the plaintiffs’ circumstances bore no meaningful resemblance to those facts.

A dissent argued that the nonprofit plaintiffs were more than advocacy organizations, serving as providers of legal counseling and referral services to immigrants. S.B. 4 would “perceptibly impair” their ability to deliver those core services by forcing them to navigate an entirely new state criminal immigration system on top of the existing federal one. The dissent saw the “critical” fact in Havens Realty as the organization’s operation of a counseling service that was directly affected by the defendant’s actions. No. 24-50149, Apr. 24, 2026.