(Slip Opinion)              OCTOBER TERM, 2022                                       1

                                       Syllabus

         NOTE: Where it is feasible, a syllabus (headnote) will be released, as is
       being done in connection with this case, at the time the opinion is issued.
       The syllabus constitutes no part of the opinion of the Court but has been
       prepared by the Reporter of Decisions for the convenience of the reader.
       See United States v. Detroit Timber & Lumber Co., 

.


SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

                                       Syllabus

             UNITED STATES ET AL. v. TEXAS ET AL.

   CERTIORARI BEFORE JUDGMENT TO THE UNITED STATES
        COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT

    No. 22–58. Argued November 29, 2022—Decided June 23, 2023
In 2021, the Secretary of Homeland Security promulgated new immigra-
  tion-enforcement guidelines (Guidelines for the Enforcement of Civil
  Immigration Law) that prioritize the arrest and removal from the
  United States of noncitizens who are suspected terrorists or dangerous
  criminals or who have unlawfully entered the country only recently,
  for example. The States of Texas and Louisiana claim that the Guide-
  lines contravene two federal statutes that they read to require the ar-
  rest of certain noncitizens upon their release from prison (

(c)) or entry of a final order of removal (§1231(a)(2)). The District
  Court found that the States would incur costs due to the Executive’s
  failure to comply with those alleged statutory mandates, and that the
  States had standing to sue based on those costs. On the merits, the
  District Court found the Guidelines unlawful and vacated them. The
  Fifth Circuit declined to stay the District Court’s judgment, and this
  Court granted certiorari before judgment.
Held: Texas and Louisiana lack Article III standing to challenge the
 Guidelines. Pp. 3–14.
    (a) Under Article III, a plaintiff must have standing to sue. This
 bedrock constitutional requirement has its roots in the separation of
 powers. So the threshold question here is whether the States have
 standing to maintain this suit. Based on this Court’s precedents and
 longstanding historical practice, the answer is no.
    To establish standing, a plaintiff must show an injury in fact caused
 by the defendant and redressable by a court order. The District Court
 found that the States would incur additional costs due to the chal-
 lenged arrest policy. And monetary costs are an injury. But this Court
 has stressed that the alleged injury must also “be legally and judicially
 cognizable.” Raines v. Byrd, 

. That requires that
2                       UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                                   Syllabus

    the dispute is “traditionally thought to be capable of resolution
    through the judicial process.” 

 Here, the States cite no precedent,
    history, or tradition of federal courts entertaining lawsuits of this kind.
    On the contrary, this Court has previously ruled that a plaintiff lacks
    standing to bring such a suit “when he himself is neither prosecuted
    nor threatened with prosecution.” See Linda R. S. v. Richard D., 

. The Linda R. S. Article III standing principle remains
    the law today, and the States have pointed to no case or historical prac-
    tice holding otherwise. Pp. 3–6.
       (b) There are good reasons why federal courts have not traditionally
    entertained lawsuits of this kind. For one, when the Executive Branch
    elects not to arrest or prosecute, it does not exercise coercive power
    over an individual’s liberty or property, and thus does not infringe
    upon interests that courts often are called upon to protect. Moreover,
    such lawsuits run up against the Executive’s Article II authority to
    decide “how to prioritize and how aggressively to pursue legal actions
    against defendants who violate the law.” TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez,
    

, ___. The principle of Executive Branch enforcement dis-
    cretion over arrests and prosecutions extends to the immigration con-
    text. Courts also generally lack meaningful standards for assessing
    the propriety of enforcement choices in this area, which are invariably
    affected by resource constraints and regularly changing public-safety
    and public-welfare needs. That is why this Court has recognized that
    federal courts are generally not the proper forum for resolving claims
    that the Executive Branch should make more arrests or bring more
    prosecutions. Pp. 6–9.
       (c) This holding does not suggest that federal courts may never en-
    tertain cases involving the Executive Branch’s alleged failure to make
    more arrests or bring more prosecutions. First, the Court has adjudi-
    cated selective-prosecution claims under the Equal Protection Clause
    in which a plaintiff typically seeks to prevent his or her own prosecu-
    tion. Second, the standing analysis might differ when Congress ele-
    vates de facto injuries to the status of legally cognizable injuries re-
    dressable by a federal court. Third, the standing calculus might
    change if the Executive Branch wholly abandoned its statutory respon-
    sibilities to make arrests or bring prosecutions. Fourth, a challenge to
    an Executive Branch policy that involves both arrest or prosecution
    priorities and the provision of legal benefits or legal status could lead
    to a different standing analysis. Fifth, policies governing the contin-
    ued detention of noncitizens who have already been arrested arguably
    might raise a different standing question than arrest or prosecution
    policies. But this case presents none of those scenarios. Pp. 9–12.
       (d) The discrete standing question raised by this case rarely arises
    because federal statutes that purport to require the Executive Branch
                     Cite as: 

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                                 Syllabus

  to make arrests or bring prosecutions are rare. This case is different
  from those in which the Federal Judiciary decides justiciable cases in-
  volving statutory requirements or prohibitions on the Executive, be-
  cause it implicates the Executive Branch’s enforcement discretion and
  raises the distinct question of whether the Federal Judiciary may in
  effect order the Executive Branch to take enforcement actions. The
  Court’s decision does not indicate any view on whether the Executive
  is complying with its statutory obligations. Nor does the Court’s nar-
  row holding signal any change in the balance of powers between Con-
  gress and the Executive. Pp. 12–14.

, reversed.

   KAVANAUGH, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS,
C. J., and SOTOMAYOR, KAGAN, and JACKSON, JJ., joined. GORSUCH, J.,
filed an opinion concurring in the judgment, in which THOMAS and BAR-
RETT, JJ., joined. BARRETT, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judg-
ment, in which GORSUCH, J., joined. ALITO, J., filed a dissenting opinion.
                        Cite as: 

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                             Opinion of the Court

     NOTICE: This opinion is subject to formal revision before publication in the
     United States Reports. Readers are requested to notify the Reporter of
     Decisions, Supreme Court of the United States, Washington, D. C. 20543,
     [email protected], of any typographical or other formal errors.


SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
                                   _________________

                                    No. 22–58
                                   _________________


        UNITED STATES, ET AL., PETITIONERS v.
                   TEXAS, ET AL.
ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI BEFORE JUDGMENT TO THE UNITED
    STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT
                                 [June 23, 2023]

   JUSTICE KAVANAUGH delivered the opinion of the Court.
   In 2021, after President Biden took office, the
Department of Homeland Security issued new Guidelines
for immigration enforcement. The Guidelines prioritize the
arrest and removal from the United States of noncitizens
who are suspected terrorists or dangerous criminals, or who
have unlawfully entered the country only recently, for
example. Texas and Louisiana sued the Department of
Homeland Security.        According to those States, the
Department’s new Guidelines violate federal statutes that
purportedly require the Department to arrest more
criminal noncitizens pending their removal.
   The States essentially want the Federal Judiciary to
order the Executive Branch to alter its arrest policy so as to
make more arrests. But this Court has long held “that a
citizen lacks standing to contest the policies of the
prosecuting authority when he himself is neither
prosecuted nor threatened with prosecution.” Linda R. S.
v. Richard D., 

 (1973). Consistent with
that fundamental Article III principle, we conclude that the
States lack Article III standing to bring this suit.
2                 UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                     Opinion of the Court

                               I
  In 2021, Secretary of Homeland Security Mayorkas
promulgated new “Guidelines for the Enforcement of Civil
Immigration Law.” The Guidelines prioritize the arrest
and removal from the United States of noncitizens who are
suspected terrorists or dangerous criminals, or who have
unlawfully entered the country only recently, for example.
  Texas and Louisiana sued the Department of Homeland
Security, as well as other federal officials and agencies.
According to those States, the Guidelines contravene two
federal statutes that purportedly require the Department
to arrest more criminal noncitizens pending their removal.
First, the States contend that for certain noncitizens, such
as those who are removable due to a state criminal
conviction, §1226(c) of Title 8 says that the Department
“shall” arrest those noncitizens and take them into custody
when they are released from state prison.            Second,
§1231(a)(2), as the States see it, provides that the
Department “shall” arrest and detain certain noncitizens
for 90 days after entry of a final order of removal.
  In the States’ view, the Department’s failure to comply
with those statutory mandates imposes costs on the States.
The States assert, for example, that they must continue to
incarcerate or supply social services such as healthcare and
education to noncitizens who should be (but are not being)
arrested by the Federal Government.
  The U. S. District Court for the Southern District of
Texas found that the States would incur costs as a result of
the Department’s Guidelines. Based on those costs, the
District Court determined that the States have standing.
On the merits, the District Court ruled that the Guidelines
are unlawful, and vacated the Guidelines. 

, 502 (SD Tex. 2022); see 

(2). The U. S.
Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit declined to stay the
District Court’s judgment. 

 (2022). This Court
granted certiorari before judgment. 

 (2022).
                  Cite as: 

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                      Opinion of the Court

                                II
   Article III of the Constitution confines the federal judicial
power to “Cases” and “Controversies.” Under Article III, a
case or controversy can exist only if a plaintiff has standing
to sue—a bedrock constitutional requirement that this
Court has applied to all manner of important disputes. See,
e.g., TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, 

, ___ (2021)
(slip op., at 7); California v. Texas, 

, ___ (2021)
(slip op., at 4); Carney v. Adams, 

, ___–___
(2020) (slip op., at 4–5); Hollingsworth v. Perry, 

 (2013); Clapper v. Amnesty Int’l USA, 

 (2013); Raines v. Byrd, 

 (1997);
Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 

, 559–560
(1992); Allen v. Wright, 

 (1984);
Schlesinger v. Reservists Comm. to Stop the War, 

 (1974); United States v. Richardson, 

 (1974).
   As this Court’s precedents amply demonstrate, Article III
standing is “not merely a troublesome hurdle to be
overcome if possible so as to reach the ‘merits’ of a lawsuit
which a party desires to have adjudicated; it is a part of the
basic charter promulgated by the Framers of the
Constitution at Philadelphia in 1787.”            Valley Forge
Christian College v. Americans United for Separation of
Church and State, Inc., 

 (1982). The
principle of Article III standing is “built on a single basic
idea—the idea of separation of powers.” Allen, 

. Standing doctrine helps safeguard the Judiciary’s
proper—and properly limited—role in our constitutional
system. By ensuring that a plaintiff has standing to sue,
federal courts “prevent the judicial process from being used
to usurp the powers of the political branches.” Clapper, 

.
4                    UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                         Opinion of the Court

                              A
   According to Texas and Louisiana, the arrest policy
spelled out in the Department of Homeland Security’s 2021
Guidelines does not comply with the statutory arrest
mandates in §1226(c) and §1231(a)(2). The States want the
Federal Judiciary to order the Department to alter its
arrest policy so that the Department arrests more
noncitizens.1
   The threshold question is whether the States have
standing under Article III to maintain this suit. The
answer is no.
   To establish standing, a plaintiff must show an injury in
fact caused by the defendant and redressable by a court
order. See Lujan, 504 U. S., at 560–561. The District Court
found that the States would incur additional costs because
the Federal Government is not arresting more noncitizens.
Monetary costs are of course an injury. But this Court has
“also stressed that the alleged injury must be legally and
judicially cognizable.” Raines, 

. That
“requires, among other things,” that the “dispute is
traditionally thought to be capable of resolution through
the judicial process”—in other words, that the asserted
injury is traditionally redressable in federal court. 

(internal quotation marks omitted); accord Valley Forge,

. In adhering to that core principle, the
Court has examined “history and tradition,” among other
things, as “a meaningful guide to the types of cases that
Article III empowers federal courts to consider.” Sprint
Communications Co. v. APCC Services, Inc., 

 (2008); see TransUnion LLC, 594 U. S., at ___–___ (slip
op., at 8–9).
——————
   1 The States may want the Department to arrest all of the noncitizens

it is now arresting plus other noncitizens—or instead to arrest some of
the noncitizens it is now arresting plus other noncitizens. Either way,
the States seek a court order that would alter the Department’s arrest
policy so that the Department arrests more noncitizens.
                  Cite as: 

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                      Opinion of the Court

   The States have not cited any precedent, history, or
tradition of courts ordering the Executive Branch to change
its arrest or prosecution policies so that the Executive
Branch makes more arrests or initiates more prosecutions.
On the contrary, this Court has previously ruled that a
plaintiff lacks standing to bring such a suit.
   The leading precedent is Linda R. S. v. Richard D., 

 (1973). The plaintiff in that case contested a
State’s policy of declining to prosecute certain child-support
violations. This Court decided that the plaintiff lacked
standing to challenge the State’s policy, reasoning that in
“American jurisprudence at least,” a party “lacks a
judicially cognizable interest in the prosecution . . . of
another.” 

. The Court concluded that “a citizen
lacks standing to contest the policies of the prosecuting
authority when he himself is neither prosecuted nor
threatened with prosecution.” 

   The Court’s Article III holding in Linda R. S. applies to
challenges to the Executive Branch’s exercise of
enforcement discretion over whether to arrest or prosecute.
See 

; Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 

,
760–761, 767, n. 13 (2005); cf. Sure-Tan, Inc. v. NLRB, 

 (1984) (citing Linda R. S. principle in
immigration context and stating that the petitioners there
had “no judicially cognizable interest in procuring
enforcement of the immigration laws” by the Executive
Branch). And importantly, that Article III standing
principle remains the law today; the States have pointed to
no case or historical practice holding otherwise. A “telling
indication of the severe constitutional problem” with the
States’ assertion of standing to bring this lawsuit “is the
lack of historical precedent” supporting it. Free Enterprise
Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Bd., 

, 505 (2010) (internal quotation marks omitted);
see also Raines, 

 (“Not only do appellees
lack support from precedent, but historical practice appears
6                     UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                          Opinion of the Court

to cut against them as well”).
  In short, this Court’s precedents and longstanding
historical practice establish that the States’ suit here is not
the kind redressable by a federal court.
                               B
   Several good reasons explain why, as Linda R. S. held,
federal courts have not traditionally entertained lawsuits
of this kind.
   To begin with, when the Executive Branch elects not to
arrest or prosecute, it does not exercise coercive power over
an individual’s liberty or property, and thus does not
infringe upon interests that courts often are called upon to
protect. See Lujan, 504 U. S., at 561–562. And for standing
purposes, the absence of coercive power over the plaintiff
makes a difference: When “a plaintiff ’s asserted injury
arises from the government’s allegedly unlawful regulation
(or lack of regulation) of someone else, much more is
needed” to establish standing. Id., at 562 (emphasis
deleted).2
   Moreover, lawsuits alleging that the Executive Branch
has made an insufficient number of arrests or brought an
insufficient number of prosecutions run up against the
Executive’s Article II authority to enforce federal law.
Article II of the Constitution assigns the “executive Power”
to the President and provides that the President “shall take
Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” U. S. Const.,
Art. II, §1, cl. 1; §3. Under Article II, the Executive Branch
possesses authority to decide “how to prioritize and how
aggressively to pursue legal actions against defendants who
violate the law.” TransUnion LLC, 594 U. S., at ___ (slip
op., at 13); see Lujan, 504 U. S., at 576–578; Allen, 468
——————
  2 By contrast, when “the plaintiff is himself an object of the action (or

forgone action) at issue,” “there is ordinarily little question that the
action or inaction has caused him injury, and that a judgment preventing
or requiring the action will redress it.” Lujan, 504 U. S., at 561–562.
                 Cite as: 

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                     Opinion of the Court

U. S., at 760–761.       The Executive Branch—not the
Judiciary—makes arrests and prosecutes offenses on behalf
of the United States. See United States v. Nixon, 

 (1974) (“the Executive Branch has exclusive
authority and absolute discretion to decide whether to
prosecute a case”); Printz v. United States, 

,
922–923 (1997) (Brady Act provisions held unconstitutional
because, among other things, they transferred power to
execute federal law to state officials); United States v.
Armstrong, 

 (1996) (decisions about
enforcement of “the Nation’s criminal laws” lie within the
“special province of the Executive” (internal quotation
marks omitted)); Buckley v. Valeo, 

 (1976)
(“A lawsuit is the ultimate remedy for a breach of the law,
and it is to the President, and not to the Congress, that the
Constitution entrusts the responsibility to ‘take Care that
the Laws be faithfully executed’ ” (quoting U. S. Const.,
Art. II, §3)); see also United States v. Cox, 

 (CA5 1965).
   That principle of enforcement discretion over arrests and
prosecutions extends to the immigration context, where the
Court has stressed that the Executive’s enforcement
discretion implicates not only “normal domestic law
enforcement priorities” but also “foreign-policy objectives.”
Reno v. American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Comm., 

, 490–491 (1999). In line with those principles,
this Court has declared that the Executive Branch also
retains discretion over whether to remove a noncitizen from
the United States. Arizona v. United States, 

 (2012) (“Federal officials, as an initial matter, must
decide whether it makes sense to pursue removal at all”).
   In addition to the Article II problems raised by judicial
review of the Executive Branch’s arrest and prosecution
policies, courts generally lack meaningful standards for
assessing the propriety of enforcement choices in this area.
After all, the Executive Branch must prioritize its
8                    UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                         Opinion of the Court

enforcement efforts. See Wayte v. United States, 

, 607–608 (1985). That is because the Executive Branch
(i) invariably lacks the resources to arrest and prosecute
every violator of every law and (ii) must constantly react
and adjust to the ever-shifting public-safety and public-
welfare needs of the American people.
   This case illustrates the point. As the District Court
found, the Executive Branch does not possess the resources
necessary to arrest or remove all of the noncitizens covered
by §1226(c) and §1231(a)(2). That reality is not an
anomaly—it is a constant. For the last 27 years since
§1226(c) and §1231(a)(2) were enacted in their current
form, all five Presidential administrations have determined
that resource constraints necessitated prioritization in
making immigration arrests.
   In light of inevitable resource constraints and regularly
changing public-safety and public-welfare needs, the
Executive Branch must balance many factors when
devising arrest and prosecution policies. That complicated
balancing process in turn leaves courts without meaningful
standards for assessing those policies. Cf. Heckler v.
Chaney, 

, 830–832 (1985); Lincoln v. Vigil, 

, 190–192 (1993). Therefore, in both Article III
cases and Administrative Procedure Act cases, this Court
has consistently recognized that federal courts are
generally not the proper forum for resolving claims that the
Executive Branch should make more arrests or bring more
prosecutions. See Linda R. S., 

; cf. Heckler,

 (recognizing the “general unsuitability for
judicial review of agency decisions to refuse enforcement”);
ICC v. Locomotive Engineers, 

 (1987) (“it
is entirely clear that the refusal to prosecute cannot be the
subject of judicial review”).3
——————
 3 Also, the plaintiffs here are States, and federal courts must remain

mindful of bedrock Article III constraints in cases brought by States
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                          Opinion of the Court

  All of those considerations help explain why federal
courts have not traditionally entertained lawsuits of this
kind. By concluding that Texas and Louisiana lack
standing here, we abide by and reinforce the proper role of
the Federal Judiciary under Article III. The States’ novel
standing argument, if accepted, would entail expansive
judicial direction of the Department’s arrest policies. If the
Court green-lighted this suit, we could anticipate
complaints in future years about alleged Executive Branch
under-enforcement of any similarly worded laws—whether
they be drug laws, gun laws, obstruction of justice laws, or
the like. We decline to start the Federal Judiciary down
that uncharted path.        Our constitutional system of
separation of powers “contemplates a more restricted role
for Article III courts.” Raines, 

.
                             C
  In holding that Texas and Louisiana lack standing, we do
not suggest that federal courts may never entertain cases
involving the Executive Branch’s alleged failure to make
more arrests or bring more prosecutions.
  First, the Court has adjudicated selective-prosecution
claims under the Equal Protection Clause. In those cases,
however, a party typically seeks to prevent his or her own
prosecution, not to mandate additional prosecutions

——————
against an executive agency or officer. To be sure, States sometimes have
standing to sue the United States or an executive agency or officer. See,
e.g., New York v. United States, 

 (1992). But in our system
of dual federal and state sovereignty, federal policies frequently generate
indirect effects on state revenues or state spending. And when a State
asserts, for example, that a federal law has produced only those kinds of
indirect effects, the State’s claim for standing can become more
attenuated. See Massachusetts v. Laird, 

 (1970); Florida v.
Mellon, 

, 16–18 (1927); cf. Lujan, 504 U. S., at 561–562. In
short, none of the various theories of standing asserted by the States in
this case overcomes the fundamental Article III problem with this
lawsuit.
10                   UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                          Opinion of the Court

against other possible defendants. See, e.g., Wayte, 

; Armstrong, 

.
   Second, as the Solicitor General points out, the standing
analysis might differ when Congress elevates de facto
injuries to the status of legally cognizable injuries
redressable by a federal court. See Brief for Petitioners 20,
n. 3; cf. TransUnion LLC, 594 U. S., at ___–___ (slip op., at
10–11); Federal Election Comm’n v. Akins, 

(1998); Raines, 

; Lujan, 

; Linda R. S., 

. For example,
Congress might (i) specifically authorize suits against the
Executive Branch by a defined set of plaintiffs who have
suffered concrete harms from executive under-enforcement
and (ii) specifically authorize the Judiciary to enter
appropriate orders requiring additional arrests or
prosecutions by the Executive Branch.
   Here, however, the relevant statutes do not supply such
specific authorization. The statutes, even under the States’
own reading, simply say that the Department “shall” arrest
certain noncitizens. Given the “deep-rooted nature of law-
enforcement discretion,” a purported statutory arrest
mandate, without more, does not entitle any particular
plaintiff to enforce that mandate in federal court. Castle
Rock, 

, 764–765, 767, n. 13; cf. Heckler, 

. For an arrest mandate to be enforceable in
federal court, we would need at least a “stronger indication”
from Congress that judicial review of enforcement
discretion     is   appropriate—for      example,     specific
authorization for particular plaintiffs to sue and for federal
courts to order more arrests or prosecutions by the
Executive. Castle Rock, 

. We do not take
a position on whether such a statute would suffice for
Article III purposes; our only point is that no such statute
is present in this case.4
——————
 4 As the Solicitor General noted, those kinds of statutes, by infringing
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                        Opinion of the Court

   Third, the standing calculus might change if the
Executive Branch wholly abandoned its statutory
responsibilities to make arrests or bring prosecutions.
Under the Administrative Procedure Act, a plaintiff
arguably could obtain review of agency non-enforcement if
an agency “has consciously and expressly adopted a general
policy that is so extreme as to amount to an abdication of
its statutory responsibilities.” Heckler, 

 (internal quotation marks omitted); see 

(Brennan, J., concurring); cf. 

(1). So too, an
extreme case of non-enforcement arguably could exceed the
bounds of enforcement discretion and support Article III
standing. But the States have not advanced a Heckler-style
“abdication” argument in this case or argued that the
Executive has entirely ceased enforcing the relevant
statutes. Therefore, we do not analyze the standing
ramifications of such a hypothetical scenario.
   Fourth, a challenge to an Executive Branch policy that
involves both the Executive Branch’s arrest or prosecution
priorities and the Executive Branch’s provision of legal
benefits or legal status could lead to a different standing
analysis. That is because the challenged policy might
implicate more than simply the Executive’s traditional
enforcement discretion. Cf. Department of Homeland
Security v. Regents of Univ. of Cal., 

, ___–___
(2020) (slip op., at 11–12) (benefits such as work
authorization and Medicare eligibility accompanied by non-
enforcement meant that the policy was “more than simply
a non-enforcement policy”); Texas v. United States, 

 (CA5 2015) (Linda R. S. “concerned only
nonprosecution,”     which     is   distinct   from     “both
nonprosecution and the conferral of benefits”), aff ’d by an
equally divided Court, 

 (2016). Again, we need
——————
on the Executive’s enforcement discretion, could also raise Article II
issues. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 24–25.
12                    UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                          Opinion of the Court

not resolve the Article III consequences of such a policy.
  Fifth, policies governing the continued detention of
noncitizens who have already been arrested arguably might
raise a different standing question than arrest or
prosecution policies. Cf. Biden v. Texas, 

(2022). But this case does not concern a detention policy, so
we do not address the issue here.5
                                D
  The discrete standing question raised by this case rarely
arises because federal statutes that purport to require the
Executive Branch to make arrests or bring prosecutions are
rare—not surprisingly, given the Executive’s Article II
authority to enforce federal law and the deeply rooted
history of enforcement discretion in American law. Indeed,
the States cite no similarly worded federal laws. This case
therefore involves both a highly unusual provision of
federal law and a highly unusual lawsuit.
  To be clear, our Article III decision today should in no way
be read to suggest or imply that the Executive possesses
some freestanding or general constitutional authority to
disregard statutes requiring or prohibiting executive
action. Moreover, the Federal Judiciary of course routinely
and appropriately decides justiciable cases involving
statutory requirements or prohibitions on the Executive.

——————
  5 This case concerns only arrest and prosecution policies, and we

therefore address only that issue. As to detention, the Solicitor General
has represented that the Department’s Guidelines do not affect
continued detention of noncitizens already in federal custody. See Brief
for Petitioners 24; Tr. of Oral Arg. 40 (Solicitor General: “the Guidelines
govern only decisions about apprehension and removal, whether to
charge a non-citizen in the first place. . . . the Guidelines don’t have
anything to do with continued detention”); Guidelines Memorandum,
App. 111 (“This memorandum provides guidance for the apprehension
and removal of noncitizens”); 

 (“We will prioritize for
apprehension and removal noncitizens who are a threat to our national
security, public safety, and border security”).
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                          Opinion of the Court

See, e.g., American Hospital Assn. v. Becerra, 

,
___–___ (2022) (slip op., at 9–14); Weyerhaeuser Co. v.
United States Fish and Wildlife Serv., 

, ___–
___ (2018) (slip op., at 8–15); Zivotofsky v. Clinton, 

, 196–201 (2012); Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 

,
592–595, 613–615, 635 (2006); 

 at 636–646 (Kennedy, J.,
concurring); Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 

, 637–638, 640 (1952) (Jackson, J., concurring).
  This case is categorically different, however, because it
implicates only one discrete aspect of the executive power—
namely, the Executive Branch’s traditional discretion over
whether to take enforcement actions against violators of
federal law. And this case raises only the narrow Article III
standing question of whether the Federal Judiciary may in
effect order the Executive Branch to take enforcement
actions against violators of federal law—here, by making
more arrests. Under this Court’s Article III precedents and
the historical practice, the answer is no.6
  It bears emphasis that the question of whether the
federal courts have jurisdiction under Article III is distinct
from the question of whether the Executive Branch is
complying with the relevant statutes—here, §1226(c) and
§1231(a)(2). In other words, the question of reviewability is
different from the question of legality. We take no position
on whether the Executive Branch here is complying with its
legal obligations under §1226(c) and §1231(a)(2). We hold
——————
  6 As part of their argument for standing, the States also point to

Massachusetts v. EPA, 

 (2007). Putting aside any
disagreements that some may have with Massachusetts v. EPA, that
decision does not control this case. The issue there involved a challenge
to the denial of a statutorily authorized petition for rulemaking, not a
challenge to an exercise of the Executive’s enforcement discretion. 

; see also 

 (noting that there are “key differences
between a denial of a petition for rulemaking and an agency’s decision
not to initiate an enforcement action” and that “an agency’s refusal to
initiate enforcement proceedings is not ordinarily subject to judicial
review”).
14                UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                      Opinion of the Court

only that the federal courts are not the proper forum to
resolve this dispute.
  On that point, even though the federal courts lack Article
III jurisdiction over this suit, other forums remain open for
examining the Executive Branch’s arrest policies. For
example, Congress possesses an array of tools to analyze
and influence those policies—oversight, appropriations, the
legislative process, and Senate confirmations, to name a
few. Cf. Raines, 

; Lincoln, 

.
And through elections, American voters can both influence
Executive Branch policies and hold elected officials to
account for enforcement decisions. In any event, those are
political checks for the political process. We do not opine on
whether any such actions are appropriate in this instance.
  The Court’s standing decision today is narrow and simply
maintains the longstanding jurisprudential status quo. See
Linda R. S., 

. The Court’s decision does not
alter the balance of powers between Congress and the
Executive, or change the Federal Judiciary’s traditional
role in separation of powers cases.
                          *     *   *
   In sum, the States have brought an extraordinarily
unusual lawsuit. They want a federal court to order the
Executive Branch to alter its arrest policies so as to make
more arrests.      Federal courts have not traditionally
entertained that kind of lawsuit; indeed, the States cite no
precedent for a lawsuit like this. The States lack Article III
standing because this Court’s precedents and the
“historical experience” preclude the States’ “attempt to
litigate this dispute at this time and in this form.” Raines,

. And because the States lack Article III
standing, the District Court did not have jurisdiction. We
reverse the judgment of the District Court.

                                              It is so ordered.
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              GORSUCH        , J., concurring
                     , J., concurring  in judgment

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
                          _________________

                           No. 22–58
                          _________________


       UNITED STATES, ET AL., PETITIONERS v.
                  TEXAS, ET AL.
 ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF
            APPEALS FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT
                        [June 23, 2023]

   JUSTICE GORSUCH, with whom JUSTICE THOMAS and
JUSTICE BARRETT join, concurring in the judgment.
   The Court holds that Texas and Louisiana lack Article III
standing to challenge the Department of Homeland Secu-
rity’s Guidelines for the Enforcement of Civil Immigration
Law. I agree. But respectfully, I diagnose the jurisdictional
defect differently. The problem here is redressability.
                               I
  Article III vests federal courts with the power to decide
“Cases” and “Controversies.” Standing doctrine honors the
limitations inherent in this assignment by ensuring judges
attend to actual harms rather than abstract grievances. “If
individuals and groups could invoke the authority of a fed-
eral court to forbid what they dislike for no more reason
than they dislike it, we would risk exceeding the judiciary’s
limited constitutional mandate and infringing on powers
committed to other branches of government.” American Le-
gion v. American Humanist Assn., 

, ___ (2019)
(GORSUCH, J., concurring in judgment) (slip op., at 3).
  To establish standing to sue in federal court, a plaintiff
must show that it has suffered a concrete and particular-
ized injury, one that is both traceable to the defendant and
redressable by a court order. See Lujan v. Defenders of
Wildlife, 

, 560–561 (1992). If a plaintiff fails
2                  UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                    GORSUCH
               GORSUCH        , J., concurring
                      , J., concurring  in judgment

at any step, the court cannot reach the merits of the dis-
pute. See Steel Co. v. Citizens for Better Environment, 

, 102–104 (1998). This is true whether the plaintiff
is a private person or a State. After all, standing doctrine
derives from Article III, and nothing in that provision sug-
gests a State may have standing when a similarly situated
private party does not. See Massachusetts v. EPA, 

, 536–538 (2007) (ROBERTS, C. J., dissenting).
   The Court holds that Texas and Louisiana lack standing
to challenge the Guidelines because “a party lacks a judi-
cially cognizable interest in the prosecution . . . of another.”
Ante, at 5 (internal quotation marks omitted). To be sure,
the district court found that the Guidelines have led to an
increase in the number of aliens with criminal convictions
and final orders of removal who are released into the States.

, 459–463, 467 (SD Tex. 2022). The dis-
trict court also found that, thanks to this development, the
States have spent, and continue to spend, more money on
law enforcement, incarceration, and social services. 

 at
463–465, 467. Still, the Court insists, “[s]everal good rea-
sons explain why” these harms are insufficient to afford the
States standing to challenge the Guidelines. Ante, at 6.
   I confess to having questions about each of the reasons
the Court offers. Start with its observation that the States
have not pointed to any “historical practice” of courts order-
ing the Executive Branch to change its arrest or prosecution
policies. Ante, at 5, 6. The Court is right, of course, that
“history and tradition offer a meaningful guide to the types
of cases that Article III empowers federal courts to con-
sider.” TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, 

, ___
(2021) (slip op., at 8) (internal quotation marks omitted).
But, again, the district court found that the Guidelines im-
pose “significant costs” on the States. 606 F. Supp. 3d, at
495. The Court today does not set aside this finding as
clearly erroneous. Nor does anyone dispute that even one
dollar’s worth of harm is traditionally enough to “qualify as
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                      , J., concurring  in judgment

concrete injur[y] under Article III.” TransUnion, 594 U. S.,
at ___ (slip op., at 9); see also Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski,

, ___ (2021) (slip op., at 11). Indeed, this Court
has allowed other States to challenge other Executive
Branch policies that indirectly caused them monetary
harms. See, e.g., Department of Commerce v. New York, 

, ___–___ (2019) (slip op., at 9–10). So why are
these States now forbidden from doing the same?
  Next, the Court contends that, “when the Executive
Branch elects not to arrest or prosecute, it does not exercise
coercive power over an individual’s liberty or property.”
Ante, at 6. Here again, in principle, I agree. But if an ex-
ercise of coercive power matters so much to the Article III
standing inquiry, how to explain decisions like Massachu-
setts v. EPA? There the Court held that Massachusetts had
standing to challenge the federal government’s decision not
to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehi-
cles. See 549 U. S., at 516–526. And what could be less
coercive than a decision not to regulate? In Massachusetts
v. EPA, the Court chose to overlook this difficulty in part
because it thought the State’s claim of standing deserved
“special solicitude.” 

. I have doubts about that
move. Before Massachusetts v. EPA, the notion that States
enjoy relaxed standing rules “ha[d] no basis in our jurispru-
dence.” 

 (ROBERTS, C. J., dissenting). Nor has
“special solicitude” played a meaningful role in this Court’s
decisions in the years since. Even so, it’s hard not to wonder
why the Court says nothing about “special solicitude” in
this case. And it’s hard not to think, too, that lower courts
should just leave that idea on the shelf in future ones.
  Finally, the Court points to the fact that Article II vests
in the President considerable enforcement discretion. Ante,
at 6–8. So much so that “courts generally lack meaningful
standards for assessing the propriety of [the Executive
Branch’s] enforcement choices.” Ante, at 7. But almost as
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                    GORSUCH
               GORSUCH        , J., concurring
                      , J., concurring  in judgment

soon as the Court announces this general rule, it adds a ca-
veat, stressing that “[t]his case concerns only arrest and
prosecution policies.” Ante, at 12, n. 5. It’s a curious quali-
fication. Article II does not have an Arrest and Prosecution
Clause. It endows the President with the “executive
Power,” §1, cl. 1, and charges him with “tak[ing] Care” that
federal laws are “faithfully executed,” §3. These provisions
give the President a measure of discretion over the enforce-
ment of all federal laws, not just those that can lead to ar-
rest and prosecution. So if the Court means what it says
about Article II, can it mean what it says about the narrow-
ness of its holding? There’s another curious qualification in
the Court’s opinion too. “[T]he standing calculus might
change,” we are told, “if the Executive Branch wholly aban-
doned its statutory responsibilities to make arrests or bring
prosecutions.” Ante, at 11. But the Court declines to say
more than that because “the States have not advanced”
such an argument. Ibid. Is that true, though? The States
have pleaded a claim under the Take Care Clause. App.
106. Is that not an abdication argument? Did they fail to
plead it properly? Or is the Court simply ignoring it?
                                 II
  As I see it, the jurisdictional problem the States face in
this case isn’t the lack of a “judicially cognizable” interest
or injury. Ante, at 5 (internal quotation marks omitted).
The States proved that the Guidelines increase the number
of aliens with criminal convictions and final orders of re-
moval released into the States. They also proved that, as a
result, they spend more money on everything from law en-
forcement to healthcare. The problem the States face con-
cerns something else altogether—a lack of redressability.
  To establish redressability, a plaintiff must show from
the outset of its suit that its injuries are capable of being
remedied “ ‘by a favorable decision.’ ” Lujan, 

; see also 

 (plurality opinion). Ordinarily,
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                      , J., concurring  in judgment

to remedy harms like those the States demonstrated in this
suit, they would seek an injunction. The injunction would
direct federal officials to detain aliens consistent with what
the States say the immigration laws demand. But even as-
suming an injunction like that would redress the States’ in-
juries, that form of relief is not available to them.
  It is not available because of 

(f )(1).
There, Congress provided that “no court (other than the Su-
preme Court) shall have jurisdiction or authority to enjoin
or restrain the operation of ” certain immigration laws, in-
cluding the very laws the States seek to have enforced in
this case. If there were any doubt about how to construe
this command, we resolved it in Garland v. Aleman Gonza-
lez, 

 (2022). In that case, we held that
§1252(f )(1) “prohibits lower courts from . . . order[ing] fed-
eral officials to take or to refrain from taking actions to en-
force, implement, or otherwise carry out the specified stat-
utory provisions.” Id., at ___ (slip op., at 5). Put simply, the
remedy that would ordinarily have the best chance of re-
dressing the States’ harms is a forbidden one in this case.
  The district court thought it could sidestep §1252(f )(1).
Instead of issuing an injunction, it purported to “vacate” the
Guidelines pursuant to §706(2) of the Administrative Pro-
cedure Act (APA), 

(2). 606 F. Supp. 3d, at
498–501, and n. 71. Vacatur, as the district court under-
stood it, is a distinct form of relief that operates directly on
agency action, depriving it of legal force or effect. See 

at 499–500. And vacatur, the district court reasoned, does
not offend §1252(f )(1), because it does not entail an order
directing any federal official to do anything. See id., at 501,
n. 71. The States embrace this line of argument before us.
Brief for Respondents 43–47; Tr. of Oral Arg. 75–82.
  It’s a clever workaround, but it doesn’t succeed. Start
with perhaps the simplest reason. Assume for the moment
the district court was right that §1252(f )(1) does not bar va-
catur orders and that §706(2) authorizes courts to issue
6                 UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                    GORSUCH
               GORSUCH        , J., concurring
                      , J., concurring  in judgment

them. Even so, a vacatur order still does nothing to redress
the States’ injuries. The Guidelines merely advise federal
officials about how to exercise their prosecutorial discretion
when it comes to deciding which aliens to prioritize for ar-
rest and removal. A judicial decree rendering the Guide-
lines a nullity does nothing to change the fact that federal
officials possess the same underlying prosecutorial discre-
tion. Nor does such a decree require federal officials to
change how they exercise that discretion in the Guidelines’
absence. It’s a point even the States have acknowledged.
Tr. of Oral Arg. 82–83; see also id., at 75–77, 125.
   Faced with that difficulty, the States offer this reply. As
a practical matter, they say, we can expect federal officials
to alter their arrest and prosecution priorities in light of a
judicial opinion reasoning that the Guidelines are unlawful.
See id., at 80, 82–83. But this doesn’t work either. What-
ever a court may say in an opinion does no more to compel
federal officials to change how they exercise their prosecu-
torial discretion than an order vacating the Guidelines. Nor
do we measure redressability by asking whether a court’s
legal reasoning may inspire or shame others into acting dif-
ferently. We measure redressability by asking whether a
court’s judgment will remedy the plaintiff ’s harms. As this
Court recently put it: “It is a federal court’s judgment, not
its opinion, that remedies an injury; thus it is the judgment,
not the opinion, that demonstrates redressability.” Haa-
land v. Brackeen, 

, ___ (2023) (slip op., at 32).
If the rule were otherwise, and courts could “simply assume
that everyone . . . will honor the legal rationales that un-
derlie their decrees, then redressability [would] always ex-
ist.” Franklin v. Massachusetts, 

 (1992)
(Scalia, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment).
   Perhaps sensing they have run into yet another road-
block, the States try one last way around it. Fleetingly,
they direct us to the parenthetical in §1252(f)(1): “(other
than the Supreme Court).” That language, they say, allows
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               GORSUCH        , J., concurring
                      , J., concurring  in judgment

this Court to invoke the All Writs Act, 

, to
fashion its own injunction. And the possibility that this
Court might award them relief, the States suggest, makes
their injuries redressable after all. See Brief for Respond-
ents 47; cf. post, at 12 (ALITO, J., dissenting).
   It’s an argument that yields more questions than an-
swers. The parenthetical the States cite is a “curious” pro-
vision, one that “does not appear to have an analogue else-
where in the United States Code.” Biden v. Texas, 

, ___ (2022) (BARRETT, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 4).
Even assuming it permits this Court to award an injunction
when a case comes to us on review, it does not obviously
solve the States’ redressability problem. Normally, after
all, a plaintiff must establish redressability from the outset
of the suit. See Lujan, 

; see also 

 (plurality opinion). Not only that, a plaintiff must show
a favorable decision is “ ‘likely’ ” to provide effectual relief.

. When the States filed this suit, however, the
possibility that it might find its way to this Court was spec-
ulative at best. See 

 (plurality opinion) (re-
jecting an argument that redressability could depend on
“the fortuity that [a] case has made its way to this Court”).
   Nor is that the only complication. Ordinarily, to win an
injunction from any court, a party must satisfy several fac-
tors. See eBay Inc. v. MercExchange, L. L. C., 

 (2006). The States relegate any mention of these fac-
tors to a short, formulaic paragraph tacked onto the end of
their brief. See Brief for Respondents 48. Worse, the only
injunction they seek is one barring “implementation and
enforcement” of the Guidelines—essentially an injunction
imitating a vacatur order. Id., at 47. And as we have seen,
an order like that would leave officials with their prosecu-
torial discretion intact. See supra, at 6. So, even if this
Court were to take the unusual step of issuing and superin-
tending its own injunction, giving the States the very order
they seek is hardly sure to redress the injuries they assert.
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                    GORSUCH
               GORSUCH        , J., concurring
                      , J., concurring  in judgment

                             III
  Beyond these redressability problems may lie still an-
other. Recall the essential premise on which the district
court proceeded—that the APA empowers courts to vacate
agency action. The federal government vigorously disputes
this premise, arguing that the law does not contemplate
this form of relief. The reasons the government offers are
plenty and serious enough to warrant careful consideration.
                                A
   Traditionally, when a federal court finds a remedy mer-
ited, it provides party-specific relief, directing the defend-
ant to take or not take some action relative to the plaintiff.
If the court’s remedial order affects nonparties, it does so
only incidentally. See, e.g., Doran v. Salem Inn, Inc., 

 (1975) (“[N]either declaratory nor injunctive
relief can directly interfere with the enforcement of con-
tested statutes or ordinances except with respect to the par-
ticular federal plaintiffs.”); Alemite Mfg. Corp. v. Staff, 

 (CA2 1930) (L. Hand, J.) (“[A] court of equity . . .
cannot lawfully enjoin the world at large.”); see also Trump
v. Hawaii, 

, ___ (2018) (THOMAS, J., concur-
ring) (slip op., at 6). This tracks the founding-era under-
standing that courts “render a judgment or decree upon the
rights of the litigant[s].” Rhode Island v. Massachusetts, 

 (1838). It also ensures that federal courts re-
spect the limits of their Article III authority to decide cases
and controversies and avoid trenching on the power of the
elected branches to shape legal rights and duties more
broadly. After all, the “judicial Power” is the power to “de-
cide cases for parties, not questions for everyone.” S. Bray,
Multiple Chancellors: Reforming the National Injunction,

, 421 (2017).
   Despite these foundational principles, in recent years a
number of lower courts have asserted the authority to issue
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decrees that purport to define the rights and duties of some-
times millions of people who are not parties before them.
Three years ago, I reflected on the rise of the “universal in-
junctio[n]” and raised questions about its consistency with
the separation of powers and our precedents. Department
of Homeland Security v. New York, 

, ___ (2020)
(opinion concurring in grant of stay) (slip op., at 3). I ob-
served, too, that “the routine issuance of universal injunc-
tions” has proven “unworkable, sowing chaos for litigants,
the government, courts, and all those affected by these
[sometimes] conflicting” decrees. 

   Matters have not improved with time. Universal injunc-
tions continue to intrude on powers reserved for the elected
branches. They continue to deprive other lower courts of
the chance to weigh in on important questions before this
Court has to decide them. They continue to encourage par-
ties to engage in forum shopping and circumvent rules gov-
erning class-wide relief. Recent events have highlighted
another problem too. Sometimes, the government may ef-
fectively submit to a universal decree running against it in
order to avoid “the usual and important requirement, under
the [APA], that a regulation originally promulgated using
notice and comment . . . may only be repealed through no-
tice and comment.” Arizona v. City and County of San
Francisco, 

, ___ (2022) (ROBERTS, C. J., concur-
ring) (slip op., at 2). It is a strategy that amounts to little
more than “ ‘rulemaking-by-collective-acquiescence.’ ” Ibid.;
see also Danco Laboratories, LLC v. Alliance for Hippo-
cratic Medicine, 

, ___ (2023) (ALITO, J., dissent-
ing from grant of application for stays) (slip op., at 3); Ari-
zona v. Mayorkas, 

, ___–___ (2023) (statement
of GORSUCH, J.) (slip op., at 1–4).
   Today’s case presents a variation on the theme. The dis-
trict court ordered “wholesale vacatur” of the Guidelines,
rendering them inoperable with respect to any person any-
where. 606 F. Supp. 3d, at 499, 502. As authority for its
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course, the district court cited §706(2) of the APA. That
provision does not say anything about “vacating” agency ac-
tion (“wholesale” or otherwise). Instead, it authorizes a re-
viewing court to “set aside” agency action. Still, from those
two words alone, the district court thought the power to nul-
lify the Guidelines with respect to anyone anywhere surely
follows. See 606 F. Supp. 3d, at 498–500.
   Color me skeptical. If the Congress that unanimously
passed the APA in 1946 meant to overthrow the “bedrock
practice of case-by-case judgments with respect to the par-
ties in each case” and vest courts with a “new and far-reach-
ing” remedial power, it surely chose an obscure way to do it.
Arizona v. Biden, 

, 396 (CA6 2022) (Sutton,
C. J., concurring). At the very least, it is worth a closer look.
                               B
   Begin with the words “set aside” in isolation. If they
might suggest to some a power to “vacate” agency action in
the sense of rendering it null and void, just as naturally
they might mean something else altogether. They might
simply describe what a court usually does when it finds a
federal or state statute unconstitutional, or a state law
preempted by a federal one. Routinely, a court will disre-
gard offensive provisions like these and proceed to decide
the parties’ dispute without respect to them. In Dennis v.
United States, 

 (1951), for example, Justice
Frankfurter observed that “[w]e are to set aside the judg-
ment of those whose duty it is to legislate only if ” the Con-
stitution requires it. 

 (concurring opinion). Jus-
tice Frankfurter hardly meant to suggest the Court had the
power to erase statutes from the books. See 

 at 525–526.
Instead, he used the phrase to mean that a court should
disregard—refuse to apply—an unconstitutional law. It is
a usage that was common at the time of the APA’s adoption
and that remains so today. See Webster’s New Interna-
tional Dictionary 2291 (2d ed. 1954) (defining “set aside” as
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“to put to one side; discard; dismiss” and “to reject from con-
sideration; overrule”); Webster’s New World College Dic-
tionary 1329 (5th ed. 2016) (defining “set aside” as “to set
apart” and “to discard; dismiss; reject”).
   There are many reasons to think §706(2) uses “set aside”
to mean “disregard” rather than “vacate.” For one thing, at
the time of the APA’s adoption, conventional wisdom re-
garded agency rules as “quasi-legislative” in nature. See
Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, 

 (1935); see also D. Currie & F. Goodman, Judicial Re-
view of Federal Administrative Action: Quest for the Opti-
mum Forum, 

, 40 (1975). And federal
courts have never enjoyed the power to “vacate” legislation.
Instead, they possess “little more than the negative power
to disregard an unconstitutional enactment.” Massachu-
setts v. Mellon, 

 (1923). Reading “set
aside” to mean “disregard” ensures parallel judicial treat-
ment of statutes and rules.
   For another thing, the term “set aside” appears in §706 of
the APA. That section is titled “Scope of review,” a title it
has borne since the law’s enactment in 1946. 

.
And ordinarily, when we think about the scope of a court’s
review, we do not think about the remedies the court may
authorize after reaching its judgment on the merits. In-
stead, we think about the court’s decisional process leading
up to that judgment. Understanding “set aside” as a com-
mand to disregard an unlawful rule in the decisional pro-
cess fits perfectly within this design. Understanding the
phrase as authorizing a remedy does not.
   What follows in §706 appears to confirm the point. The
statute begins by providing that, “[t]o the extent necessary
to decision and when presented, the reviewing court shall
decide all relevant questions of law, interpret constitutional
and statutory provisions, and determine the meaning and
applicability of the terms of an agency action.” Exactly as
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expected, we find an instruction about the decisional pro-
cess—one requiring the court to apply “de novo review on
questions of law” as it considers the parties’ arguments in
the course of reaching its judgment. Kisor v. Wilkie, 

, ___ (2019) (GORSUCH, J., concurring in judgment)
(slip op., at 15) (internal quotation marks omitted). Noth-
ing here speaks to remedies.
   The remaining statutory language is more of the same.
Section 706 goes on to instruct that “[t]he reviewing court
shall . . . hold unlawful and set aside agency action, find-
ings, and conclusions found to be,” among other things, “ar-
bitrary,” “capricious,” “contrary to constitutional right,” “in
excess of ” statutory authority, or “unsupported by substan-
tial evidence.” §706(2). Looking at the provision as a whole,
rather than focusing on two words in isolation, we see fur-
ther evidence that it governs a court’s scope of review or
decisional process. The statute tells judges to resolve the
cases that come to them without regard to deficient agency
action, findings, or conclusions—an instruction entirely
consistent with the usual “negative power” of courts “to dis-
regard” that which is unlawful. Mellon, 

.
   Other details are telling too. Consider the latter part of
§706(2)’s directive to “set aside agency action, findings, and
conclusions.” The APA defines “agency action” to include
“the whole or a part of an agency rule, order, license, sanc-
tion, relief, or the equivalent or denial thereof, or failure to
act.” 

(13). A court can disregard any of those
things. But what would it even mean to say a court must
render null and void an agency’s failure to act? Notice, too,
the language about “findings.” Often, judges disregard fac-
tual findings unsupported by record evidence and resolve
the case at hand without respect to them. See Fed. Rule
Civ. Proc. 52(a)(6) (“Findings of fact . . . must not be set
aside unless clearly erroneous.”). None of that means we
may pretend to rewrite history and scrub any trace of faulty
findings from the record.
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   Consider as well the larger statutory context. Section 702
restricts judicial review to “person[s]” who have “suffer[ed]
legal wrong because of agency action, or [been] adversely
affected or aggrieved by agency action.” The provision also
instructs that “any mandatory or injunctive decree shall
specify the Federal officer or officers . . . personally respon-
sible for compliance.” Here, it seems, Congress nodded to
traditional standing rules and remedial principles. Yet un-
der the district court’s reading, we must suppose Congress
proceeded just a few paragraphs later to plow right through
those rules and empower a single judge to award a novel
form of relief affecting parties and nonparties alike.
   Then there is §703. That is where the APA most clearly
discusses remedies. Section 703 authorizes aggrieved per-
sons to bring “any applicable form of legal action, including
actions for declaratory judgments or writs of prohibitory or
mandatory injunction or habeas corpus.” Conspicuously
missing from the list is vacatur. And what exactly would a
“form of legal action” seeking vacatur look like anyway?
Would it be a creature called a “writ of vacatur”? Nobody
knows (or bothers to tell us). Nor is it apparent why Con-
gress would have listed most remedies in §703 only to bury
another (and arguably the most powerful one) in a later sec-
tion addressed to the scope of review. Cf. J. Harrison, Sec-
tion 706 of the Administrative Procedure Act Does Not Call
for Universal Injunctions or Other Universal Remedies, 37
Yale J. Reg. Bull. 37, 37, 45–46 (2020).
   The district court’s reading of “set aside” invites still
other anomalies. Section 706(2) governs all proceedings un-
der the APA. Any interpretation of “set aside” therefore
must make sense in the context of an enforcement proceed-
ing, an action for a declaratory judgment, a suit for an in-
junction, or habeas. See §703. This poses a problem for the
district court’s interpretation, for no one thinks a court ad-
judicating a declaratory action or a habeas petition “va-
cates” agency action along the way. See Brief for United
14                UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                    GORSUCH
               GORSUCH        , J., concurring
                      , J., concurring  in judgment

States 41–42; Harrison, 37 Yale J. Reg. Bull., at 46. The
anomaly dissipates, however, if we read §706(2) as instruct-
ing courts about when they must disregard agency action in
the process of deciding a case.
   Imagine what else it would mean if §706(2) really did au-
thorize vacatur. Ordinary joinder and class-action proce-
dures would become essentially irrelevant in administra-
tive litigation. Why bother jumping through those hoops
when a single plaintiff can secure a remedy that rules the
world? See Bray, 131 Harv. L. Rev., at 464–465. Surely,
too, it is odd that leading scholars who wrote extensively
about the APA after its adoption apparently never noticed
this supposed remedy. See J. Harrison, Vacatur of Rules
Under the Administrative Procedure Act, 40 Yale J. Reg.
Bull. 119, 127–128 (2023) (discussing scholarship of Profes-
sors Kenneth Culp Davis and Louis Jaffe); see also Depart-
ment of Justice, Attorney General’s Manual on the Admin-
istrative Procedure Act 108 (1947) (offering the Executive
Branch’s view that §706 simply “restates the present law as
to the scope of judicial review”). These are not people who
would have missed such a major development in their field.
                               C
  As always, there are arguments on the other side of the
ledger, and the States tee up several. They first reply that
§706(2) must allow vacatur of agency action because the
APA models judicial review of agency action on appellate
review of judgments, and appellate courts sometimes va-
cate judgments. Brief for Respondents 40. But just because
“Congress may sometimes refer to collateral judicial review
of executive action as ‘an appeal’ . . . does not make it an
‘appeal’ akin to that taken from the district court to the
court of appeals.” Garland v. Ming Dai, 

, ___
(2021) (slip op., at 9). Nor does any of that tell us in which
respects the APA models judicial review of agency action on
appellate review of lower court judgments. According to one
                  Cite as: 

 (2023)            15

                    GORSUCH
               GORSUCH        , J., concurring
                      , J., concurring  in judgment

scholar, the “salient” similarities between appellate review
and judicial review of agency action concern the standards
of review—in both types of proceedings, a reviewing court
engages in a more rigorous review of legal questions and a
more deferential review of factual findings. T. Merrill, Ar-
ticle III, Agency Adjudication, and the Origins of the Appel-
late Review Model of Administrative Law, 

, 940–941 (2011). None of that has to do with
remedies; once again, it concerns a court’s scope of review
or decisional process.
   The States next invoke §706(1) and §705. The former pro-
vides that courts shall “compel agency action unlawfully
withheld or unreasonably delayed.” The latter says courts
“may issue all necessary and appropriate process to post-
pone the effective date of an agency action or to preserve
status or rights pending conclusion of the review proceed-
ings.” The States insist that “[i]t would be illogical” for the
APA to authorize these remedies but not vacatur. Brief for
Respondents 40. Is it so clear, though, that §706(1) and
§705 authorize remedies? Section 706(1) does seem to con-
template a remedy. But it’s one §703 mentions—manda-
tory injunctions. So §706(1) might not authorize a remedy
as much as confirm the availability of a traditional remedy
to address agency inaction. The same could be said about
§705; it might just confirm courts’ authority to issue tradi-
tional equitable relief pending judicial review. Cf. Sampson
v. Murray, 

 (1974) (explaining that
§705 was “primarily intended to reflect existing law”).
   The States also direct us to scholarship that in turn pur-
ports to identify a few instances of federal courts “setting
aside” agency action in the years leading up to the APA.
See Brief for Respondents 41; see also Brief for State of
Florida as Amicus Curiae 17. It is not obvious, however,
that these few cases stand for so much. In two of them, this
Court upheld the agency action in question and thus had no
occasion to opine on appropriate relief. See Houston v.
16                UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                    GORSUCH
               GORSUCH        , J., concurring
                      , J., concurring  in judgment

St. Louis Independent Packing Co., 

, 486–487
(1919); The Assigned Car Cases, 

 (1927).
In a third case, the plaintiff sought “to enjoin enforcement
of ” an order of the Federal Communications Commission.
Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc. v. United States, 

 (1942). That is a claim for traditional equi-
table relief, and indeed, the Court held that the complaint
“state[d] a cause of action in equity” and remanded for fur-
ther proceedings. 

. A fourth case, involving an
order of the Interstate Commerce Commission, seems of a
piece. There, a district court held the Commission’s order
invalid and “restrain[ed] . . . enforcement” of it. Baltimore
& Ohio R. Co. v. United States, 

 (ND
Ohio 1933). This Court affirmed. See United States v. Bal-
timore & Ohio R. Co., 

 (1935). True, this Court
described the case as an “appeal from [a] decree . . . setting
aside” the Commission’s order. 

. But the fact
that the lower court had only restrained enforcement of the
order goes to show that “set aside” did not then (and does
not now) necessarily translate to “vacate.”
   At the end of the day, the States fall back on other lower
court decisions. “For more than 30 years,” they say, “vaca-
tur has been the ordinary result when the D. C. Circuit de-
termines that agency regulations are unlawful.” Brief for
Respondents 42 (internal quotation marks omitted).
Doubtless, to the extent those decisions are carefully rea-
soned, they merit respectful consideration. But, equally,
they do not bind us. Cf. post, at 14, n. 7 (ALITO, J., dissent-
ing) (observing that this Court has only ever “assumed” that
the APA authorizes vacatur).
   In raising questions about the district court’s claim that
§706(2) authorizes vacatur of agency action, I do not pre-
tend that the matter is open and shut. Thoughtful argu-
ments and scholarship exist on both sides of the debate.
Nor do I mean to equate vacatur of agency action with uni-
versal injunctions. Despite some similarities, courts can at
                  Cite as: 

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                    GORSUCH
               GORSUCH        , J., concurring
                      , J., concurring  in judgment

least arguably trace their authority to order vacatur to lan-
guage in a statute and practice in some lower courts. But
the questions here are serious ones. And given the volume
of litigation under the APA, this Court will have to address
them sooner or later. Until then, we would greatly benefit
from the considered views of our lower court colleagues.
                                D
   Suppose my doubts about vacatur are unfounded. Sup-
pose the APA really does authorize both traditional forms
of equitable relief (in §703) and a more expansive equitable
power to vacate agency action (in §706). Even if that were
true, a district court should “think twice—and perhaps
twice again—before granting” such sweeping relief. Ari-
zona v. Biden, 40 F. 4th, at 396 (Sutton, C. J., concurring).
   After all, this Court has long instructed that equitable re-
lief “must be limited to the inadequacy that produced [the]
injury in fact.” Gill v. Whitford, 

, ___ (2018)
(slip op., at 14) (internal quotation marks omitted). Any
remedy a judge authorizes must not be ‘‘more burdensome
[to the defendant] than necessary to redress the complain-
ing parties.’’ Califano v. Yamasaki, 

(1979). And faithful application of those principles suggests
that an extraordinary remedy like vacatur would demand
truly extraordinary circumstances to justify it. Cf. S. Bray
& P. Miller, Getting Into Equity, 97 N. D. L. Rev. 1763,
1797 (2022) (“[I]n equity it all connects—the broader and
deeper the remedy the plaintiff wants, the stronger the
plaintiff ’s story needs to be.”).
   The temptations a single district judge may face when in-
vited to vacate agency rules are obvious. Often, plaintiffs
argue that everyone deserves to benefit from their effort to
litigate the case and the court’s effort to decide it. Judges
may think efficiency and uniformity favor the broadest pos-
sible relief. But there are serious countervailing consider-
ations. As with universal injunctions, vacatur can stymie
18                 UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                    GORSUCH
               GORSUCH        , J., concurring
                      , J., concurring  in judgment

the orderly review of important questions, lead to forum
shopping, render meaningless rules about joinder and class
actions, and facilitate efforts to evade the APA’s normal
rulemaking processes. Vacatur can also sweep up nonpar-
ties who may not wish to receive the benefit of the court’s
decision. Exactly that happened here. Dozens of States,
counties, and cities tell us they did not seek and do not want
the “benefit” of the district court’s vacatur order in this
case. See Brief for New York et al. as Amici Curiae 1–2;
Brief for 21 Cities, Counties, and Local Government Organ-
izations as Amici Curiae 2–3.
   More importantly still, universal relief, whether by way
of injunction or vacatur, strains our separation of powers.
It exaggerates the role of the Judiciary in our constitutional
order, allowing individual judges to act more like a legisla-
ture by decreeing the rights and duties of people nation-
wide. This Court has warned that “[f]ew exercises of the
judicial power are more likely to undermine public confi-
dence in the neutrality and integrity of the Judiciary than
one which casts [courts] in the role of a Council of Revision,
conferring on [themselves] the power to invalidate laws at
the behest of anyone who disagrees with them.” Arizona
Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn, 

, 145–146 (2011). At a minimum, then, district courts
must carefully consider all these things before doling out
universal relief. And courts of appeals must do their part,
too, asking whether party-specific relief can adequately pro-
tect the plaintiff ’s interests. If so, an appellate court should
not hesitate to hold that broader relief is an abuse of discre-
tion. Cf. Kentucky v. Biden, 

, 556–557 (CA6
2023) (Larsen, J.).
                             *
  In our system of government, federal courts play an im-
portant but limited role by resolving cases and controver-
sies. Standing doctrine honors this limitation at the front
                 Cite as: 

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                   GORSUCH
              GORSUCH        , J., concurring
                     , J., concurring  in judgment

end of every lawsuit. It preserves a forum for plaintiffs
seeking relief for concrete and personal harms while filter-
ing out those with generalized grievances that belong to a
legislature to address. Traditional remedial rules do simi-
lar work at the back end of a case. They ensure successful
plaintiffs obtain meaningful relief. But they also restrain
courts from altering rights and obligations more broadly in
ways that would interfere with the power reserved to the
people’s elected representatives. In this case, standing and
remedies intersect. The States lack standing because fed-
eral courts do not have authority to redress their injuries.
Section 1252(f )(1) denies the States any coercive relief. A
vacatur order under §706(2) supplies them no effectual re-
lief. And such an order itself may not even be legally per-
missible. The States urge us to look past these problems,
but I do not see how we might. The Constitution affords
federal courts considerable power, but it does not establish
“government by lawsuit.” R. Jackson, The Struggle for Ju-
dicial Supremacy 286–287 (1941).
                   Cite as: 

 (2023)              1

                     BARRETT
                BARRETT         , J., concurring
                        , J., concurring  in judgment

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
                            _________________

                             No. 22–58
                            _________________


       UNITED STATES, ET AL., PETITIONERS v.
                  TEXAS, ET AL.
 ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF
            APPEALS FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT
                          [June 23, 2023]

   JUSTICE BARRETT, with whom JUSTICE GORSUCH joins,
concurring in the judgment.
   I agree with the Court that the States lack standing to
challenge the Federal Government’s Guidelines for the en-
forcement of immigration law. But I reach that conclusion
for a different reason: The States failed to show that the
District Court could order effective relief.            JUSTICE
GORSUCH ably explains why that is so. Ante, p. 1 (opinion
concurring in judgment). And because redressability is an
essential element of Article III standing, the District Court
did not have jurisdiction.
   The Court charts a different path. In its view, this case
can be resolved based on what it calls the “fundamental Ar-
ticle III principle” that “ ‘a citizen lacks standing to contest
the policies of the prosecuting authority when he himself is
neither prosecuted nor threatened with prosecution.’ ”
Ante, at 1 (quoting Linda R. S. v. Richard D., 

 (1973)). In other words, the Court says, the States have
not asserted a “ ‘judicially cognizable interest’ ” in this case.
Ante, at 5. Respectfully, I would not take this route.
                             I
  To begin with, I am skeptical that Linda R. S. suffices to
resolve this dispute. First, the Court reads that decision
2                  UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                    BARRETT
               BARRETT         , J., concurring
                       , J., concurring  in judgment

too broadly. Consider the facts. The “mother of an illegiti-
mate child” sued in federal court, “apparently seek[ing] an
injunction running against the district attorney forbidding
him from declining prosecution” of the child’s father for fail-
ure to pay child support. 410 U. S., at 614–616. She ob-
jected, on equal protection grounds, to the State’s view that
“fathers of illegitimate children” were not within the ambit
of the relevant child-neglect statute. 

.
   We agreed that the plaintiff “suffered an injury stemming
from the failure of her child’s father to contribute support
payments.” 

. But if the plaintiff “were granted
the requested relief, it would result only in the jailing of the
child’s father.” 

 Needless to say, the prospect that
prosecution would lead to child-support payments could, “at
best, be termed only speculative.” 

 For this reason, we
held that the plaintiff lacked standing. Only then, after re-
solving the standing question on redressability grounds, did
we add that “a private citizen lacks a judicially cognizable
interest in the prosecution or nonprosecution of another.”

. In short, we denied standing in Linda R. S. be-
cause it was speculative that the plaintiff ’s requested relief
would redress her asserted injury, not because she failed to
allege one. See Duke Power Co. v. Carolina Environmental
Study Group, Inc., 

 (1978).
   Viewed properly, Linda R. S. simply represents a specific
application of the general principle that “when the plaintiff
is not himself the object of the government action or inac-
tion he challenges, standing is not precluded, but it is ordi-
narily ‘substantially more difficult’ to establish” given the
causation and redressability issues that may arise. Lujan
v. Defenders of Wildlife, 

 (1992). That is
true for the States here. I see little reason to seize on the
case’s bonus discussion of whether “a private citizen” has a
“judicially cognizable interest in the prosecution or
nonprosecution of another” to establish a broad rule of Ar-
ticle III standing. Linda R. S., 

.
                  Cite as: 

 (2023)             3

                    BARRETT
               BARRETT         , J., concurring
                       , J., concurring  in judgment

   Second, even granting the broad principle the Court
takes from Linda R. S., I doubt that it applies with full force
in this case. Unlike the plaintiff in Linda R. S., the States
do not seek the prosecution of any particular individual—
or even any particular class of individuals. See ASARCO
Inc. v. Kadish, 

 (1989) (“[F]ederal stand-
ing ‘often turns on the nature and source of the claim as-
serted’ ”). In fact, they disclaim any interest in the prose-
cution or nonprosecution of noncitizens. See Brief for
Respondents 15; Tr. of Oral Arg. 124–125.                 They
acknowledge that 

(c)(1)’s detention obliga-
tion “only applies until” the Government makes “a decision
whether or not to prosecute.” Tr. of Oral Arg. 100. And
they readily concede that if the Government decides not to
prosecute, any detention obligation imposed by §1226(c)(1)
“immediately ends.” Ibid. The States make similar conces-
sions with respect to §1231(a)(2). They maintain, for exam-
ple, that §1231(a)(2) applies “only where the United States
has used its prosecutorial discretion to bring a notice to ap-
pear, to prosecute that all the way to a final . . . order of
removal.” Id., at 130. But if the Government for any reason
“choose[s] to discontinue proceedings,” the alleged deten-
tion obligation does not attach. Id., at 131.
   The upshot is that the States do not dispute that the Gov-
ernment can prosecute whomever it wants. They seek, in-
stead, the temporary detention of certain noncitizens dur-
ing elective removal proceedings of uncertain duration.
And the States’ desire to remove the Guidelines’ influence
on the Government’s admittedly broad discretion to enforce
immigration law meaningfully differs from the Linda R. S.
plaintiff ’s desire to channel prosecutorial discretion toward
a particular target. Given all of this, I would not treat
Linda R. S. as the “leading precedent” for resolving this
case. Ante, at 5. In my view, the Court is striking new
ground rather than applying settled principles.
4                 UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                    BARRETT
               BARRETT         , J., concurring
                       , J., concurring  in judgment

                                II
   In addition to its reliance on Linda R. S., the Court offers
several reasons why “federal courts have not traditionally
entertained lawsuits of this kind.” Ante, at 6. I am skepti-
cal that these reasons are rooted in Article III standing doc-
trine.
   Take, for example, the Court’s discussion of Castle Rock
v. Gonzales, 

 (2005). Ante, at 10. There, we
reasoned that given “[t]he deep-rooted nature of law-en-
forcement discretion,” a “true mandate of police action
would require some stronger indication” from the legisla-
ture than, for example, the bare use of the word “ ‘shall’ ” in
a statutory directive. Castle Rock, 

. The
Court today concludes that “no such statute is present in
this case.” Ante, at 10. But Castle Rock is not a case about
Article III standing. It addressed “whether an individual
who has obtained a state-law restraining order has a con-
stitutionally protected property interest” under the Four-
teenth Amendment “in having the police enforce the re-
straining order when they have probable cause to believe it
has been violated.” 545 U. S., at 750–751. I see no reason
to opine on Castle Rock’s application here, especially given
that the parties (correctly) treat Castle Rock as relevant to
the merits of their statutory claims rather than to the
States’ standing to bring them. See Brief for Petitioners 8;
Brief for Respondents 30.
   The Court also invokes “the Executive’s Article II author-
ity to enforce federal law.” Ante, at 6. I question whether
the President’s duty to “take Care that the Laws be faith-
fully executed,” Art. II, §3, is relevant to the standing anal-
ysis. While it is possible that Article II imposes justiciabil-
ity limits on federal courts, it is not clear to me why any
such limit should be expressed through Article III’s defini-
tion of a cognizable injury. Moreover, the Court works the
same magic on the Take Care Clause that it does on Castle
Rock: It takes an issue that entered the case on the merits
                   Cite as: 

 (2023)              5

                     BARRETT
                BARRETT         , J., concurring
                        , J., concurring  in judgment

and transforms it into one about standing. See ante, at 4
(opinion of GORSUCH, J.)
   The Court leans, too, on principles set forth in Heckler v.
Chaney, 

 (1985). Ante, at 8, 11. But, again,
Heckler was not about standing. It addressed a different
question: “the extent to which a decision of an administra-
tive agency to exercise its ‘discretion’ not to undertake cer-
tain enforcement actions is subject to judicial review under
the Administrative Procedure Act.” 470 U. S., at 823; see
also 

(a)(2) (the APA’s judicial-review provi-
sions do not apply “to the extent” that “agency action is com-
mitted to agency discretion by law”). Heckler held that “an
agency’s decision not to take enforcement action should be
presumed immune from judicial review under” the APA.
470 U. S., at 832. But such a decision “is only presump-
tively unreviewable; the presumption may be rebutted
where the substantive statute has provided guidelines for
the agency to follow in exercising its enforcement powers.”
Id., at 832–833. Whatever Heckler’s relevance to cases like
this one, it does not establish a principle of Article III stand-
ing. And elevating it to the status of a constitutional rule
would transform it from a case about statutory provisions
(that Congress is free to amend) to one about a constitu-
tional principle (that lies beyond Congress’s domain). Alt-
hough the Court notes that Heckler involved the APA, its
conflation of Heckler with standing doctrine is likely to
cause confusion. See ante, at 8 (analogizing “Article III
cases” to “Administrative Procedure Act cases”).
                          *    *      *
  The Court weaves together multiple doctrinal strands to
create a rule that is not only novel, but also in tension with
other decisions. See ante, at 2–4 (opinion of GORSUCH, J.).
In my view, this case should be resolved on the familiar
ground that it must be “ ‘likely,’ as opposed to merely ‘spec-
ulative,’ ” that any injury “will be ‘redressed by a favorable
6                 UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                   BARRETT
              BARRETT         , J., concurring
                      , J., concurring  in judgment

decision.’ ” Lujan, 

. I respectfully concur
only in the judgment.
                  Cite as: 

 (2023)             1

                      ALITO, J., dissenting

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
                          _________________

                           No. 22–58
                          _________________


       UNITED STATES, ET AL., PETITIONERS v.
                  TEXAS, ET AL.
 ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF
            APPEALS FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT
                         [June 23, 2023]

   JUSTICE ALITO, dissenting.
   The Court holds Texas lacks standing to challenge a fed-
eral policy that inflicts substantial harm on the State and
its residents by releasing illegal aliens with criminal con-
victions for serious crimes. In order to reach this conclu-
sion, the Court brushes aside a major precedent that di-
rectly controls the standing question, refuses to apply our
established test for standing, disregards factual findings
made by the District Court after a trial, and holds that the
only limit on the power of a President to disobey a law like
the important provision at issue is Congress’s power to em-
ploy the weapons of inter-branch warfare—withholding
funds, impeachment and removal, etc. I would not blaze
this unfortunate trail. I would simply apply settled law,
which leads ineluctably to the conclusion that Texas has
standing.
   This Court has long applied a three-part test to deter-
mine whether a plaintiff has standing to sue. Under that
test, a plaintiff must plead and ultimately prove that it has
been subjected to or imminently faces an injury that is:
(1) “concrete and particularized,” (2) “fairly traceable to the
challenged action,” and (3) “likely” to be “redressed by a fa-
vorable decision.” Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 

, 560–561 (1992) (internal quotation marks and altera-
tions omitted). Under that familiar test, Texas clearly has
2                     UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                           ALITO, J., dissenting

standing to bring this suit.1
  Nevertheless, the United States (the defendant in this
case) has urged us to put this framework aside and adopt a
striking new rule. At argument, the Solicitor General was
asked whether it is the position of the United States that
the Constitution does not allow any party to challenge a
President’s decision not to enforce laws he does not like.
What would happen, the Solicitor General was asked, if a
President chose not to enforce the environmental laws or
the labor laws? Would the Constitution bar an injured
party from bringing suit? She responded:
       “That’s correct under this Court’s precedent, but the
     framers intended political checks in that circumstance.
     You know, if—if an administration did something that
     extreme and said we’re just not going to enforce the law
     at all, then the President would be held to account by
     the voters, and Congress has tools at its disposal as
     well.” Tr. of Oral Arg. 50 (emphasis added).
  Thus, according to the United States, even if a party
clearly meets our three-part test for Article III standing, the
Constitution bars that party from challenging a President’s
decision not to enforce the law. Congress may wield what
the Solicitor General described as “political . . . tools”—
which presumably means such things as withholding funds,
refusing to confirm Presidential nominees, and impeach-
ment and removal—but otherwise Congress and the Amer-
ican people must simply wait until the President’s term in
office expires.
  The Court—at least for now—does not fully embrace this
——————
   1 In a case with multiple plaintiffs, Article III permits us to reach the

merits if any plaintiff has standing. Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic
and Institutional Rights, Inc., 

 (2006). Because
Texas clearly meets our test for Article III standing, it is not necessary
to consider whether the other plaintiff, the State of Louisiana, also sat-
isfies that test.
                 Cite as: 

 (2023)            3

                     ALITO, J., dissenting

radical theory and instead holds only that, with some small
and equivocal limitations that I will discuss, no party may
challenge the Executive’s “arrest and prosecution policies.”
Ante, at 12, n. 5. But the Court provides no principled ex-
planation for drawing the line at this point, and that raises
the concern that the Court’s only reason for framing its rule
as it does is that no more is needed to dispose of this case.
In future cases, Presidential power may be extended even
further. That disturbing possibility is bolstered by the
Court’s refusal to reject the Government’s broader argu-
ment.
   As I will explain, nothing in our precedents even remotely
supports this grossly inflated conception of “executive
Power,” U. S. Const., Art. II, §1, which seriously infringes
the “legislative Powers” that the Constitution grants to
Congress, Art. I, §1. At issue here is Congress’s authority
to control immigration, and “[t]his Court has repeatedly
emphasized that ‘over no conceivable subject is the legisla-
tive power of Congress more complete than it is over’ the
admission of aliens.” Fiallo v. Bell, 

(1977). In the exercise of that power, Congress passed and
President Clinton signed a law that commands the deten-
tion and removal of aliens who have been convicted of cer-
tain particularly dangerous crimes. The Secretary of
Homeland Security, however, has instructed his agents to
disobey this legislative command and instead follow a dif-
ferent policy that is more to his liking. And the Court now
says that no party injured by this policy is allowed to chal-
lenge it in court.
   That holding not only violates the Constitution’s alloca-
tion of authority among the three branches of the Federal
Government; it also undermines federalism. This Court
has held that the Federal Government’s authority in the
field of immigration severely restricts the ability of States
to enact laws or follow practices that address harms result-
ing from illegal immigration. See Arizona v. United States,
4                  UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                       ALITO, J., dissenting

 (2012). If States are also barred from
bringing suit even when they satisfy our established test for
Article III standing, they are powerless to defend their vital
interests. If a President fails or refuses to enforce the im-
migration laws, the States must simply bear the conse-
quences. That interpretation of executive authority and Ar-
ticle III’s case or controversy requirement is deeply and
dangerously flawed.
                              I
  The Court’s opinion omits much that is necessary to un-
derstand the significance of its decision, and I therefore
begin by summarizing the relevant statutory provisions,
the challenged Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
action, and the District Court’s findings of fact regarding
the injury faced by the State of Texas as the result of what
DHS has done.
                              A
  The relevant statutory provisions have figured in several
prior decisions, and in those cases we have recounted how
they came to be enacted and have clearly described what
they require. These provisions were part of the Illegal Im-
migration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act of
1996 (IIRIRA), which was adopted “against a backdrop of
wholesale failure by the [Immigration and Naturalization
Service] to deal with increasing rates of criminal activity by
aliens.” Demore v. Kim, 

 (2003).2 Con-
gress concluded that a central cause of that failure was the
Attorney General’s “broad discretion to conduct individual-
ized bond hearings and to release criminal aliens from cus-
tody during their removal proceedings.” 

. To
remedy this problem, Congress “subtract[ed] some of that

——————
  2 The Immigration and Naturalization Service was merged into DHS

in 2003.
                   Cite as: 

 (2023)              5

                       ALITO, J., dissenting

discretion when it comes to the arrest and release of crimi-
nal aliens.” Nielsen v. Preap, 

, ___ (2019) (slip
op., at 15) (emphasis in original).
   Two such limits are important here. First, 

(c) directs the Government to “take into custody any
alien” inadmissible or deportable on certain criminal or ter-
rorist grounds “when the alien is released” from criminal
custody, including when such an alien is released on “pa-
role, supervised release, or probation.” Second, §1231(a)
imposes a categorical detention mandate.                Section
1231(a)(2) provides that the Government “shall detain [an]
alien” “[d]uring the removal period,” which often begins ei-
ther when an “order of removal becomes administratively
final” or when an “alien is released from detention or con-
finement” not arising from immigration process,
§1231(a)(1)(B). This requirement is reinforced by the direc-
tion that “[u]nder no circumstance during the removal pe-
riod shall the [Government] release an alien” found inad-
missible or deportable under almost any of the grounds
relevant under §1226(c). §1231(a)(2). And §1231(a)(1)(A)
commands that the Government “shall remove the alien”
within the removal period.
   All of our recent decisions interpreting these provisions
confirm that, for covered aliens, shall means shall; it does
not mean “may.” See Johnson v. Guzman Chavez, 

, ___–___, and n. 2 (2021) (slip op., at 2–3, and n. 2); Niel-
sen, 586 U. S., at ___–___ (slip op., at 16–17). Until quite
recently, that was the Government’s understanding as well.
See Biden v. Texas, 

, ___–___ (2022) (slip op.,
at 8–9) (ALITO, J., dissenting).
   Actions taken by Congress when IIRIRA was enacted un-
derscore this conclusion. Because the provisions described
above left the Executive with no discretion to refrain from
arresting and detaining covered aliens, even during the
time immediately after IIRIRA’s enactment when the Exec-
utive was still “expand[ing] its capacities” to enforce the
6                  UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                       ALITO, J., dissenting

new law, Congress passed “transition rules [that] delayed
the onset of the Secretary’s obligation to begin making ar-
rests as soon as covered aliens were released from criminal
custody.” Nielsen, 586 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 21). If the
Executive had possessed the discretion to decline to enforce
the new mandates in light of “resource constraints,” see
ante, at 8, those transition rules would have been entirely
“superfluous.” Nielsen, 586 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 21).
   Despite this clear text and background, the majority now
claims that the President’s “enforcement discretion” sur-
vived these mandates, ante, at 7, but there is no basis for
that conclusion. Certainly it is not supported by the cases
it cites. They either underscore the general rule that the
Executive possesses enforcement discretion, see Reno v.
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Comm., 

,
490–491 (1999), or pair that general rule with the observa-
tion that the States cannot limit the Government’s discre-
tion in pursuing removal, see Arizona, 

. Nothing in those decisions is inconsistent with Con-
gress’s power to displace executive discretion, and the fact
that “five Presidential administrations” sometimes ne-
glected the mandates is likewise irrelevant. See ante, at 8.
As I have stressed before, the Executive cannot “acquire au-
thority forbidden by law through a process akin to adverse
possession,” Biden v. Texas, 597 U. S., at ___ (dissenting
opinion) (slip op., at 15), and that is true even if the adverse
possession is bipartisan.
                             B
  The events that gave rise to this case began on January
20, 2021, when the Acting Secretary of DHS issued a mem-
orandum with “enforcement priorities” for the detention
and removal of aliens found to be in this country illegally.
This memorandum prioritized: (1) aliens “whose apprehen-
sion” implicated “national security,” (2) aliens not present
“before November 1, 2020,” and (3) aliens due to be released
                  Cite as: 

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                       ALITO, J., dissenting

from criminal confinement who had both been “convicted of
an ‘aggravated felony’ ” and were “determined to pose a
threat to public safety.” 

, 454 (SD Tex.
2022) (internal quotation marks omitted); see §1101(a)(43)
(defining “aggravated felony”). This prioritization was in-
consistent with the §1226(c) arrest mandate, which extends
to all aliens convicted of any crime within a long list of stat-
utory categories. 606 F. Supp. 3d, at 454–455.
   In February, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement
(ICE), an arm of DHS, issued a second memorandum that
slightly modified the earlier priorities and stated that “ ‘pre-
approval’ ” would generally be required “for enforcement ac-
tions” against persons outside these priority groups. Id., at
455–456. This memorandum was also inconsistent with the
relevant statutes.
   After some litigation regarding these two memoranda, a
new DHS Secretary issued a Final Memorandum instruct-
ing that even aliens in priority groups need not necessarily
be apprehended and removed. App. 113–115. Rather, the
Final Memorandum directed DHS personnel to consider
non-statutory “aggravating and mitigating factors” in de-
ciding whether to detain an alien. Id., at 114–115. It fur-
ther stated that DHS “personnel should not rely on the fact
of [a qualifying] conviction” when exercising “prosecutorial
discretion.” Id., at 115. Thus, the Final Memorandum did
not simply permit deviations from the statutory mandates;
it flatly contradicted those mandates by stating that quali-
fying convictions were insufficient grounds for initiating ar-
rest, detention, and removal.
                             C
  Texas and Louisiana challenged this Final Memorandum
in federal court under the Administrative Procedure Act
(APA). After a 2-day bench trial, the District Court found
in favor of the States and made detailed findings of fact that
bear on the issue of standing.
8                    UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                         ALITO, J., dissenting

   Much of the District Court’s analysis of that issue focused
on the Final Memorandum’s effect on the “detainer” system,
606 F. Supp. 3d, at 459–463, and it is therefore important
to understand how that system works in relation to the rel-
evant statutory provisions. When an alien in state custody
for a criminal offense is identified as falling within a cate-
gory of aliens whose apprehension and detention is re-
quired by §§1226(a) and (c), the Government should lodge a
“detainer” with the State so that the Government can take
the alien into custody when he or she is released by the
State. Then, when an alien is about to be released, a coop-
erative State will notify DHS so that it can be ready to as-
sume its obligation under §§1226(a) and (c) to take the alien
into federal custody. When that occurs, the State is spared
the burdens it would have to bear if the alien, after release,
had been placed under state law on probation, parole, or
supervised release. But if DHS rescinds a detainer before
such an alien is released (or never lodges a detainer in the
first place), those burdens fall on the State.
   After reviewing the parties’ evidence, the District Court
found that in the first month after the substantive policy
change brought about by the January 2021 DHS memoran-
dum, ICE had rescinded 141 detainers in Texas.3 Ninety-
five of the criminal aliens whose detainers were rescinded
were then released on a form of state supervision. Seven-
teen of them went on to violate their terms of supervision,
and four committed new crimes. Id., at 459.
   The court then examined what had taken place during
just the time “since the Final Memorandum became effec-
tive” and found that “because of the Final Memorandum,”
“ICE ha[d] continued to rescind detainers placed on crimi-
nal aliens in [Texas’s] custody,” and the court identified 15

——————
  3 This figure excludes instances where a detainer was withdrawn but

then reissued, or where an alien previously subject to a withdrawn de-
tainer was taken into federal custody.
                     Cite as: 

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                          ALITO, J., dissenting

specific cases in which this had occurred. 

. Re-
jecting the Government’s claim that these dropped detain-
ers were necessary in light of “limited resources,” the court
found that “the Government . . . persistently underutilized
existing detention facilities” during the relevant time and
that the average daily detained population in April 2022
was less than 40% of the 3-year high in August 2019. 

.
   Based on these findings of fact and historical data, the
District Court identified four categories of costs that Texas
had suffered and would continue to bear as a result of the
relevant DHS actions. First, the court calculated the dollars-
and-cents cost that Texas had to bear in order to supervise
criminal aliens who were released in violation of §§1226(a),
(c). Id., at 463. Second, it noted the costs associated with
criminal recidivism. Id., at 464. Third, it found that some
juvenile offenders who “are not detained by ICE because of
the Final Memorandum” will attend Texas public schools
(and at least one juvenile due to be released will do so).
Ibid. Fourth, it concluded that the hundreds of millions of
dollars that Texas annually spends on healthcare for illegal
aliens would increase when some criminal aliens not de-
tained “because of the Final Memorandum” make use of
those services. Id., at 465.
   Concluding that these costs established Texas’s injury for
standing purposes, the District Court went on to hold that
the Final Memorandum was contrary to law and that Texas
had therefore established a violation of the APA.4 As I will
explain, it is a common practice for courts in APA cases to
set aside an improper final agency action, and that is what
——————
   4 The District Court also concluded that the Final Memorandum was

“arbitrary and capricious,” and had not undergone “notice and comment,”
resulting in separate APA violations. 606 F. Supp. 3d, at 492, 495. Be-
cause the majority’s standing analysis applies equally to any APA viola-
tion, I focus only on the contrary-to-law claim and express no opinion on
these further claims.
10                UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                      ALITO, J., dissenting

the District Court did here. It vacated the Final Memoran-
dum pending further action by DHS, id., at 499, but it de-
clined to issue injunctive or declaratory relief, id., at 501–
502.
   The Government asked the Court of Appeals to stay the
District Court’s order vacating the Final Memorandum, but
that court refused to do so and observed that the Govern-
ment had not “come close” to showing “ ‘clear error’ ” in the
District Court’s factual findings on the injuries that Texas
had already incurred and would continue to incur because
of the Final Memorandum. 

, 216–217 (CA5
2022).
                            II
  Before I address the Court’s inexplicable break from our
ordinary standing analysis, I will first explain why Texas
easily met its burden to show a concrete, particularized in-
jury that is traceable to the Final Memorandum and re-
dressable by the courts. Lujan, 504 U. S., at 560–561.
                              A
   Injury in fact. The District Court’s factual findings,
which must be accepted unless clearly erroneous, quanti-
fied the cost of criminal supervision of aliens who should
have been held in DHS custody and also identified other
burdens that Texas had borne and would continue to bear
going forward. These findings sufficed to establish a con-
crete injury that was specific to Texas. TransUnion LLC v.
Ramirez, 

, ___ (2021) (slip op., at 9); see ante,
at 4 (conceding that such costs are “of course an injury”).
   Traceability. The District Court found that each category
of cost would increase “because of the Final Memorandum,”
rather than decisions that DHS personnel would make ir-
respective of the directions that memorandum contains.
606 F. Supp. 3d, at 460, 464, 465 (emphasis added).
   The majority does not hold—and in my judgment, could
                 Cite as: 

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                     ALITO, J., dissenting

not plausibly hold—that these findings are clearly errone-
ous. Instead, it observes only that a “State’s claim for
standing can become more attenuated” when based on the
“indirect effects” of federal policies “on state revenues or
state spending.” Ante, at 9, n. 3. But while it is certainly
true that indirect injuries may be harder to prove, an indi-
rect financial injury that is proved at trial supports stand-
ing. And that is what happened here. As JUSTICE
GORSUCH notes, just a few years ago, we found in a very
important case that a State had standing based in part on
indirect financial injury. Ante, at 3 (opinion concurring in
judgment) (citing Department of Commerce v. New York,

, ___–___ (2019) (slip op., at 9–10)). There is
no justification for a conflicting holding here.
   In any event, many of the costs in this case are not indi-
rect. When the Federal Government refuses or fails to com-
ply with §§1226(a) and (c) as to criminal aliens, the direct
result in many cases is that the State must continue its su-
pervision. As noted, the District Court made specific find-
ings about the financial cost that Texas incurred as a result
of DHS’s failure to assume custody of aliens covered by
§§1226(a) and (c). And the costs that a State must bear
when it is required to assume the supervision of criminal
aliens who should be kept in federal custody are not only
financial. Criminal aliens whom DHS unlawfully refuses
to detain may be placed on state probation, parole, or su-
pervised release, and some will commit new crimes and end
up in a state jail or prison. Probation, parole, and correc-
tions officers are engaged in dangerous work that can put
their lives on the line.
   Redressability. A court order that forecloses reliance on
the memorandum would likely redress the States’ injuries.
If, as the District Court found, DHS personnel rescind de-
tainers “because of ” the Final Memorandum, then vacating
that memorandum would likely lead to those detainers’ re-
maining in place.
12                     UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                           ALITO, J., dissenting

                                B
   While the majority does not contest redressability,
JUSTICE GORSUCH’s concurrence does, citing two reasons.
But the first is contrary to precedent, and the second should
not be addressed in this case.
   The first asserted reason is based on the inability of the
lower courts to issue a broad injunction forbidding enforce-
ment of the Final Memorandum. See §1252(f )(1).5 In this
case, the District Court did not issue injunctive relief. In-
stead, it vacated the Final Memorandum, and JUSTICE
GORSUCH argues that this relief did not redress Texas’s in-
juries because it does not “require federal officials to change
how they exercise [their prosecutorial] discretion in the [Fi-
nal Memorandum’s] Guidelines’ absence.” Ante, at 6.
There are two serious problems with this argument.
   First, §1252(f )(1) bars injunctive relief by courts “other
than the Supreme Court.” (Emphasis added.) As a result,
redress in the form of an injunction can be awarded by this
Court. According to the Court’s decision last Term in Biden
v. Texas, our authority to grant such relief “le[ft] no doubt”
as to our jurisdiction even if §1252(f )(1) precluded the lower
courts from setting aside an administrative action under
the APA. 597 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 10). We have not
been asked to revisit this holding, see id., at ___–___
(BARRETT, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 3–4), and I would not
do so here.
   Second, even if Biden v. Texas could be distinguished and

——————
   5 Section 1252(f )(1) reads in full:

   “Regardless of the nature of the action or claim or of the identity of the
party or parties bringing the action, no court (other than the Supreme
Court) shall have jurisdiction or authority to enjoin or restrain the oper-
ation of the provisions of part IV of this subchapter, as amended by the
Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996,
other than with respect to the application of such provisions to an indi-
vidual alien against whom proceedings under such part have been initi-
ated.”
                      Cite as: 

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                           ALITO, J., dissenting

no injunctive relief can be awarded by any court, setting
aside the Final Memorandum satisfies the redressability
requirement. Our decision in Franklin v. Massachusetts,

 (1992), settles that question. There, the Court
held that a declaratory judgment regarding the lawfulness
of Executive Branch action satisfied redressability because
“it [was] substantially likely that the President and other
executive . . . officials would abide by an authoritative in-
terpretation” of the law “even though they would not be di-
rectly bound by such a determination.” 

 (opinion
of O’Connor, J.).6 Here, we need not speculate about how
DHS officers would respond to vacatur of the Final Memo-
randum because the District Court found that the DHS per-
sonnel responsible for detainers were rescinding them “be-
cause of ” the Final Memorandum. 606 F. Supp. 3d, at 460.
This point was effectively conceded by the Government’s
application for an emergency stay pending our decision in
this case. The Government argued that the Final Memo-
randum was needed to guide prosecutorial discretion, Ap-
plication 38–39, and if the District Court’s order were inef-
fectual, that would not be true. For these reasons, the harm
resulting from the Final Memorandum is redressed by set-
ting aside the Final Memorandum.
   As to the concurrence’s second argument—that the APA’s
“set aside” language may not permit vacatur—the concur-
rence acknowledges that this would be a sea change in ad-
ministrative law as currently practiced in the lower courts.
Ante, at 16 (opinion of GORSUCH, J.); see, e.g., Data Market-
ing Partnership, LP v. United States Dept. of Labor, 45


——————
   6 While only four of eight Justices finding standing in Franklin for-

mally joined this explanation, see 505 U. S., at 824, n. 1 (Scalia, J., con-
curring in part and concurring in judgment), the Court subsequently rat-
ified this reasoning. See Utah v. Evans, 

, 463–464
(2002).
14                     UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                            ALITO, J., dissenting

F. 4th 846, 859 (CA5 2022) (“The default rule is that vaca-
tur is the appropriate remedy” under the APA); United Steel
v. Mine Safety and Health Admin., 

(CADC 2019) (“The ordinary practice is to vacate unlawful
agency action”).7 We did not grant review on this very con-
sequential question, and I would not reach out to decide it
in a case in which Biden v. Texas resolves the issue of re-
dressability.
   To be clear, I would be less troubled than I am today if
JUSTICE GORSUCH’s concurrence had commanded a major-
ity. At least then, Congress would be free to amend
§1252(f ). But the majority reaches out and redefines our
understanding of the constitutional limits on otherwise-
available lawsuits. It is to this misunderstanding that I
now turn.
                              III
   The majority adopts the remarkable rule that injuries
from an executive decision not to arrest or prosecute, even
in a civil case, are generally not “cognizable.” Ante, at 4
(internal quotation marks omitted). Its reasoning has three
failings. First, it fails to engage with contrary precedent
that is squarely on point. Second, it lacks support in the
cases on which it relies. Third, the exceptions (or possible
exceptions) that it notes do nothing to allay concern about
the majority’s break from our established test for Article III
standing. I address each of these problems in turn.


——————
   7 Our decision three years ago in Department of Homeland Security v.

Regents of Univ. of Cal., 

 (2020), appears to have assumed
that the APA authorizes this common practice. We held that the rescis-
sion of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program had to be
“vacated” because DHS had violated the procedures required by the APA.

 at ___ (slip op., at 2). If the court in that case had lacked the author-
ity to set aside the rule adopting the program, there would have been no
need to examine the sufficiency of DHS’s procedures.
                  Cite as: 

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                      ALITO, J., dissenting

                               A
   Prior to today’s decision, it was established law that
plaintiffs who suffer a traditional injury resulting from an
agency “decision not to proceed” with an enforcement action
have Article III standing. Federal Election Comm’n v.
Akins, 

 (1998). The obvious parallel to the
case before us is Massachusetts v. EPA, 

(2007), which has been called “the most important environ-
mental law case ever decided by the Court.” R. Lazarus,
The Rule of Five: Making Climate History at the Supreme

 (2020). In that prior case, Massachusetts chal-
lenged the Environmental Protection Agency’s failure to
use its civil enforcement powers to regulate greenhouse gas
emissions that allegedly injured the Commonwealth. Mas-
sachusetts argued that it was harmed because the accumu-
lation of greenhouse gases would lead to higher tempera-
tures; higher temperatures would cause the oceans to rise;
and rising sea levels would cause the Commonwealth to
lose some of its dry land. The Court noted that Massachu-
setts had a “quasi-sovereign interes[t]” in avoiding the loss
of territory and that our federalist system had stripped the
Commonwealth of “certain sovereign prerogatives” that it
could have otherwise employed to defend its interests. Mas-
sachusetts, 549 U. S., at 519–520. Proclaiming that Massa-
chusetts’ standing claim was entitled to “special solicitude,”
the Court held that the Commonwealth had standing. 

.
   The reasoning in that case applies with at least equal
force in the case at hand. In Massachusetts v. EPA, the
Court suggested that allowing Massachusetts to protect its
sovereign interests through litigation compensated for its
inability to protect those interests by the means that would
have been available had it not entered the Union. In the
present case, Texas’s entry into the Union stripped it of the
power that it undoubtedly enjoyed as a sovereign nation to
16                 UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                       ALITO, J., dissenting

police its borders and regulate the entry of aliens. The Con-
stitution and federal immigration laws have taken away
most of that power, but the statutory provisions at issue in
this case afford the State at least some protection—in par-
ticular by preventing the State and its residents from bear-
ing the costs, financial and non-financial, inflicted by the
release of certain dangerous criminal aliens. Our law on
standing should not deprive the State of even that modest
protection. We should not treat Texas less favorably than
Massachusetts. And even if we do not view Texas’s stand-
ing argument with any “special solicitude,” we should at
least refrain from treating it with special hostility by failing
to apply our standard test for Article III standing.
   Despite the clear parallel with this case and the States’
heavy reliance on Massachusetts throughout their briefing,
the majority can only spare a passing footnote for that im-
portant precedent. Ante, at 13, n. 6; see Brief for Respond-
ents 11, 12, 14, 16–18, 23; see also Brief for Arizona and 17
Other States as Amici Curiae 7–12. It first declines to say
Massachusetts was correctly decided and references the
“disagreements that some may have” with that decision.
Ante, at 13, n. 6. But it then concludes that Massachusetts
“does not control” since the decision itself refers to “ ‘key dif-
ferences between a denial of a petition for rulemaking and
an agency’s decision not to initiate an enforcement action,’ ”
with the latter “ ‘not ordinarily subject to judicial review.’ ”
Ante, at 13, n. 6 (quoting 

) (emphasis
added).
   The problem with this argument is that the portion of
Massachusetts to which the footnote refers deals not with
its key Article III holding, but with the scope of review that
is “ordinarily” available under the statutory scheme. Im-
portantly, Massachusetts frames its statement about de-
clining enforcement as restating the rule of Heckler v.
Chaney, 

 (1985). See 

. And
                  Cite as: 

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                      ALITO, J., dissenting

as the Court acknowledges when it invokes Heckler di-
rectly, that decision is not about standing; it is about the
interpretation of the statutory exception to APA review for
actions “committed to agency discretion by law.” 

(a)(2); see 470 U. S., at 823; ante, at 11. And even in
that context, Heckler expressly contemplates that any “pre-
sumption” of discretion to withhold enforcement can be re-
butted by an express statutory limitation of discretion—
which is exactly what we have here. 470 U. S., at 832–833.
   So rather than answering questions about this case, the
majority’s footnote on Massachusetts raises more questions
about Massachusetts itself—most importantly, has this
monumental decision been quietly interred? Cf. ante, at 3
(GORSUCH, J., concurring in judgment).
   Massachusetts v. EPA is not the only relevant precedent
that the Court brushes aside. “[I]t is well established that
[this Court] has an independent obligation to assure that
standing exists, regardless of whether it is challenged by
any of the parties.” Summers v. Earth Island Institute, 

 (2009). Yet in case after case, with that obli-
gation in mind, we have not questioned the standing of
States that brought suit under the APA to compel civil en-
forcement.
   In Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home
v. Pennsylvania, 

 (2020), two States sued un-
der the APA and sought to compel the Department of
Health and Human Services to cease exercising regulatory
enforcement discretion that exempted certain religious em-
ployers from compliance with a contraceptive-coverage
mandate. 

 at ___–___ (slip op., at 11–12). The issue of
the States’ standing was discussed at length in the decision
below, see Pennsylvania v. President United States, 

, 561–565 (CA3 2019), and in this Court, no Jus-
tice suggested that the Constitution foreclosed standing
simply because the States were complaining of “the Execu-
18                    UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                           ALITO, J., dissenting

tive Branch’s . . . enforcement choices” regarding third par-
ties. Ante, at 7.
   Just last Term in Biden v. Texas, two States argued that
their spending on the issuance of driver’s licenses and the
provision of healthcare for illegal immigrants sufficed to es-
tablish Article III standing and thus enabled them to sue to
compel enforcement of a detain-or-return mandate. See
Texas v. Biden, 

, 970–971 (CA5 2021). The
Court of Appeals held that the States had standing, ibid.,
and the majority in this Court, despite extended engage-
ment with other jurisdictional questions, never hinted that
Article III precluded the States’ suit. 597 U. S., at ___–___
(slip op., at 8–12).
   If the new rule adopted by the Court in this case is sound,
these decisions and others like them were all just wasted
ink. I understand that what we have called “ ‘drive-by ju-
risdictional rulings’ ” are not precedents, see Arbaugh v.
Y & H Corp., 

 (2006), but the Court
should not use a practice of selective silence to accept or re-
ject prominently presented standing arguments on incon-
sistent grounds.
                             B
   Examination of the precedents the majority invokes only
underscores the deficiencies in its analysis.8 The majority
says that the “leading precedent” supporting its holding is
Linda R. S. v. Richard D., 

 (1973). Ante, at 5.
But as JUSTICE BARRETT notes, this Court has already de-
finitively explained that the suit to compel prosecution in
Linda R. S. was rejected “because of the unlikelihood that


——————
  8 The Court also appeals to “historical experience” and “longstanding

historical practice.” Ante, at 6, 14 (internal quotation marks omitted). I
do not take this to be an argument independent from the case law cited,
since no history is discussed apart from those cases (all but one from after
1964).
                  Cite as: 

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                      ALITO, J., dissenting

the relief requested would redress appellant’s claimed in-
jury.” Duke Power Co. v. Carolina Environmental Study
Group, Inc., 

 (1978); see ante, at 2
(opinion concurring in judgment).
   The Court notes in a quick parenthetical that the “Linda
R. S. principle” was once “cit[ed] . . . in [the] immigration
context” in Sure-Tan, Inc. v. NLRB, 

(1984), ante, at 5. But Sure-Tan’s single “[c]f.” cite to Linda
R. S. provides the Court no help. 

. Sure-
Tan only rejected (quite reasonably) any standalone “cog-
nizable interest in procuring enforcement of the immigra-
tion laws” by a party who lacked any “personal interest.”

 (emphasis added). And it did so, not as part of a stand-
ing analysis, but as part of its explanation for rejecting two
employers’ attempt to assert that seeking to have employ-
ees deported as retaliation for union activity was “an aspect
of their First Amendment right ‘to petition the Government
for a redress of grievances.’ ” 

.
   After these two inapposite precedents, the majority’s au-
thority gets even weaker. I agree with JUSTICE BARRETT
that neither Heckler, nor Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 

 (2005), has real relevance here. Ante, at 4–5. Castle
Rock considered the “deep-rooted nature of law-enforce-
ment discretion” as a tool for interpreting a statute, not as
a constitutional standing rule. 

. And as
explained above, Heckler is not about standing and only
states a presumptive rule. The Court’s remaining authori-
ties are likewise consistent with the understanding that
prosecution decisions are “generally committed to an
agency’s absolute discretion” unless the relevant law rebuts
the “presumption.” Heckler, 

 (emphasis
added). For example, TransUnion states that it is only
when “unharmed plaintiffs” are before the Court that Arti-
cle III forecloses interference with the “discretion of the Ex-
ecutive Branch.” 594 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 13) (emphasis
deleted).
20                UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                      ALITO, J., dissenting

  In sum, all of these authorities point, not to the majority’s
new rule, but to the same ordinary questions we ask in
every case—whether the plaintiff has a concrete, traceable,
and redressable injury.
                              C
   Despite the majority’s capacious understanding of execu-
tive discretion, today’s opinion assures the reader that the
decision “do[es] not suggest that federal courts may never
entertain cases involving the Executive Branch’s alleged
failure to make more arrests or bring more prosecutions,”
despite its otherwise broad language covering the “exercise
of enforcement discretion over whether to arrest or prose-
cute.” Ante, at 5, 9. The majority lists five categories of
cases in which a court would—or at least might—have Ar-
ticle III jurisdiction to entertain a challenge to arrest or
prosecution policies, but this list does nothing to allay con-
cern about the Court’s new path. The Court does not iden-
tify any characteristics that are shared by all these catego-
ries and that distinguish them from cases in which it would
not find standing. In addition, the Court is unwilling to say
that cases in four of these five categories are actually ex-
empted from its general rule, and the one remaining cate-
gory is exceedingly small. I will discuss these categories
one by one.
   First, the majority distinguishes “selective-prosecution”
suits by a plaintiff “to prevent his or her own prosecution,”
ante, at 9. But such claims are ordinarily brought as de-
fenses in ongoing prosecutions, as in the cases the Court
cites, and are rarely brought in standalone actions where a
plaintiff must prove standing. This category is therefore
little more than a footnote to the Court’s general rule.
   Second, the majority grants that “the standing analysis
might differ when Congress elevates de facto injuries to the
status of legally cognizable injuries,” and it hypothesizes a
situation in which Congress “(i) specifically authorize[s]
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                       ALITO, J., dissenting

suits against the Executive Branch by a defined set of
plaintiffs who have suffered concrete harms from execu-
tive under-enforcement and (ii) specifically authorize[s] the
Judiciary to enter appropriate orders requiring additional
arrests or prosecutions by the Executive Branch.” Ante, at
10 (emphasis added). It is puzzling why the presence or
absence of such a statute should control the question of
standing under the Constitution. We have said that the en-
actment of a statute may help us to determine in marginal
cases whether an injury is sufficiently concrete and partic-
ularized to satisfy the first prong of our three-part standing
test. Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, 

, 341 (2016). But
once it is posited that a plaintiff has personally suffered a
“de facto” injury, i.e., an injury in fact, it is hard to see why
the presence or absence of a statute authorizing suit has a
bearing on the question whether the court has Article III
jurisdiction as opposed to the question whether the plaintiff
has a cause of action. In the end, however, none of this may
matter because the majority suggests that such a statute
might be unconstitutional. Ante, at 10, and n. 4.
  Third, the majority tells us that the standing outcome
“might change” if the Federal Government “wholly aban-
doned its statutory responsibilities,” but that statement is
both equivocal and vague. Ante, at 11 (emphasis added).
Under what circumstances might the Court say that the
Federal Government has “wholly abandoned” its enforce-
ment duties? Suppose the Federal Government announced
that it would obey 80% of the immigration laws or 70% of
the environmental laws. Would the Court say that it had
“wholly abandoned” enforcement of these bodies of law?
What would happen if the Final Memorandum in this case
had directed DHS agents not to arrest anyone convicted of
any covered crime other than murder? DHS would still be
enforcing the arrest mandate as to one of the many covered
crimes. Would this only-murder policy qualify as complete
abandonment? And why should the ability of a particular
22                  UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                        ALITO, J., dissenting

party to seek legal redress for an injury turn on the number
of others harmed by the challenged enforcement policy?
Standing is assessed plaintiff by plaintiff. The majority has
no answers, and in the end, it cannot even bring itself to
commit to this complete-abandonment exception. It says
only that “the standing calculus might” or “arguably could”
change. 

 (emphasis added).
   Fourth, the Court says that a plaintiff might have stand-
ing to challenge an “Executive Branch’s arrest or prosecu-
tion priorities and the Executive Branch’s provision of legal
benefits or legal status . . . because the challenged policy
might implicate more than simply the Executive’s tradi-
tional enforcement discretion.” 

 Exactly what this
means is not easy to ascertain. One possibility is that the
majority is talking about a complaint that asserts separate
claims based on the grant or denial of benefits, the grant or
denial of legal status, and harms resulting from non-en-
forcement of a statutory mandate. In that event, standing
with respect to each claim would have to be analyzed sepa-
rately. Another possibility is that the majority is referring
to a claim asserting that non-enforcement of a statutory re-
quirement requiring the arrest or prosecution of third par-
ties resulted in the plaintiff ’s loss of benefits or legal status.
Such a situation is not easy to imagine, and the majority
cites no case that falls within this category. But if such a
case were to arise, there is no reason why it should not be
analyzed under our standard three-pronged test.
   Fifth, and finally, the majority states that “policies gov-
erning the continued detention of noncitizens who have al-
ready been arrested arguably might raise a different stand-
ing question than arrest or prosecution policies.” Ante, at
12 (emphasis added). The majority provides no explanation
for this (noncommittal) distinction, and in any event, as the
majority acknowledges, the States in this case challenged
noncompliance with the §1231(a)(2) detention mandate in
addition to the §1226(c) arrest requirement. Ante, at 2, 13.
                  Cite as: 

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                      ALITO, J., dissenting

The Court points to what it sees as a “represent[ation]” by
the Solicitor General that the Final Memorandum does not
affect “continued detention of noncitizens already in federal
custody.” Ante, at 12, n. 5. But as JUSTICE BARRETT notes,
the Government argued that when it chooses not to remove
someone under the Final Memorandum’s guidance, its
mandatory detention obligation ends—meaning it is assert-
ing discretion over continued detention. Ante, at 3 (opinion
concurring in judgment).
   In any event, arrest policy cannot be divided from deten-
tion policy in this case. When a person is arrested, he or
she is detained for at least some period of time, and under
the detainer system involved here, “arrest” often simply
means transferring an immigrant from state custody to fed-
eral custody. As best I can tell, the majority’s distinction
between arrest and detention is made solely to avoid the
obvious inference that our decision last Term in Biden v.
Texas should have dismissed the case for lack of standing,
without analyzing “the Government’s detention obliga-
tions.” 597 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 14).
   In sum, with the exception of cases in the first (very
small) category (civil cases involving selective-prosecution
claims), the majority does not identify any category of cases
that it would definitely except from its general rule. In ad-
dition, category two conflates the question of constitutional
standing with the question whether the plaintiff has a
cause of action; category three is hopelessly vague; category
four is incomprehensible; and category five actually encom-
passes the case before us.
                               IV
   The Court declares that its decision upholds “[o]ur consti-
tutional system of separation of powers,” ante, at 9, but as
I said at the outset, the decision actually damages that sys-
tem by improperly inflating the power of the Executive and
cutting back the power of Congress and the authority of the
24                   UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                         ALITO, J., dissenting

Judiciary. And it renders States already laboring under the
effects of massive illegal immigration even more helpless.
  Our Constitution gives the President important powers,
and the precise extent of some of them has long been the
subject of contention, but it has been widely accepted that
“the President’s power reaches ‘its lowest ebb’ when he con-
travenes the express will of Congress, ‘for what is at stake
is the equilibrium established by our constitutional sys-
tem.’ ” Zivotofsky v. Kerry, 

, 61 (2015) (ROBERTS,
C. J., dissenting) (quoting Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v.
Sawyer, 

, 637–638 (1952) (Jackson, J., concur-
ring)).
  That is the situation here. To put the point simply, Con-
gress enacted a law that requires the apprehension and de-
tention of certain illegal aliens whose release, it thought,
would endanger public safety. The Secretary of DHS does
not agree with that categorical requirement. He prefers a
more flexible policy. And the Court’s answer today is that
the Executive’s policy choice prevails unless Congress, by
withholding funds, refusing to confirm Presidential nomi-
nees, threatening impeachment and removal, etc., can win
a test of strength. Relegating Congress to these disruptive
measures radically alters the balance of power between
Congress and the Executive, as well as the allocation of au-
thority between the Congress that enacts a law and a later
Congress that must go to war with the Executive if it wants
that law to be enforced.9
——————
   9 The majority suggests that any law that constrains an Executive’s

“enforcement discretion” is “highly unusual,” and notes that the States
cite no “similarly worded federal laws” that “require the Executive
Branch to make arrests or bring prosecutions” in other, non-immigration
contexts. Ante, at 12. But there is nothing peculiar about Congress’s
reserving its mandates for an area—immigration—where it both exer-
cises particularly broad authority, Fiallo v. Bell, 

(1977), and identifies a unique “wholesale failure” by the enforcement
authority, Demore v. Kim, 

 (2003).
                     Cite as: 

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                         ALITO, J., dissenting

   What the majority has done is to apply Oliver Wendell
Holmes’s bad-man theory of the law to the separation of
powers. Under Holmes’s theory, as popularly understood,
the law consists of those things that a bad man cannot get
away with.10 Similarly, the majority’s understanding of the
“executive Power” seems to be that a President can disobey
statutory commands unless Congress, by flexing its mus-
cles, forces capitulation. That is not the Constitution’s con-
ception of “the executive Power.” Art. II, §1. The Constitu-
tion, instead, requires a President to “take Care that the
Laws be faithfully executed.” §3 (emphasis added).
   Neither the Solicitor General nor the majority has cited
any support for the proposition that a President has the
power to disobey statutes that require him to take enforce-
ment actions, and there is strong historical evidence to the
contrary.11 The majority’s conception of Presidential au-
thority smacks of the powers that English monarchs
claimed prior to the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, namely,
the power to suspend the operation of existing statutes, and
to grant dispensations from compliance with statutes.12 Af-
ter James II was deposed, that changed. The English Bill
of Rights of 1689 emphatically rejected “the pretended
Power of Suspending of Laws or the Execution of Laws by
Rega[l] Authority without Consent of Parl[i]ament” and


——————
   10 See O. Holmes, The Path of the Law, 

, 459–460

(1897).
   11 See Z. Price, Enforcement Discretion and Executive Duty, 

, 689–696 (2014); R. Delahunty & J. Yoo, Dream On: The
Obama Administration’s Nonenforcement of Immigration Laws, the
DREAM Act, and the Take Care Clause, 91 Texas L. Rev. 781, 797–804
(2013) (Delahunty & Yoo, Dream On); see also E. Biber, Two Sides of the
Same Coin: Judicial Review of Administrative Agency Action and Inac-
tion, 26 Va. Env. L. J. 461, 472–474 (2008).
   12 See R. Reinstein, The Limits of Executive Power, 

, 277–281 (2009) (Reinstein, Limits).
26                    UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                          ALITO, J., dissenting

“the pretended Power of Dispensing with Laws or the Exe-
cution of Laws by Rega[l] Authorit[y] as it ha[s] bee[n] as-
sumed and exercised of late.”13
   By the time of the American Revolution, British mon-
archs had long abandoned the power to resist laws enacted
by Parliament,14 but the Declaration of Independence
charged George III with exercising those powers with re-
spect to colonial enactments. One of the leading charges
against him was that he had “forbidden his Governors to
pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless
suspended in their operation till his Assent should be ob-
tained; and when so suspended, . . . ha[d] utterly neglected
to attend to them.”15
   By 1787, six State Constitutions contained provisions
prohibiting the suspension of laws,16 and at the Constitu-
tional Convention, a proposal to grant the President sus-
pending authority was unanimously defeated.17 Many
——————
  13 An Act Declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject and Settling

the Succession of the Crown (Bill of Rights), 1 W. & M., Sess. 2, c. 2
(1689).
  14 The last time a British monarch withheld assent to a bill enacted by

Parliament was in 1708. 18 HL J. 506 (Mar. 11, 1708).
  15 Declaration of Independence ¶4; In 1774, Jefferson had addressed

the subject of this charge, explaining that British monarchs “for several
ages past” had “declined the exercise of this power in that part of [the]
empire called Great Britain” but had resumed the practice in the Amer-
ican Colonies and had “rejected laws of the most salutary tendency,” such
as one forbidding the importation of slaves. T. Jefferson, A Summary
View of the Rights of British America (1774), https://avalon.law.yale.edu/
18th_century/jeffsumm.asp. See G. Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s
Declaration of Independence 69 (1978).
  16 See generally S. Calabresi, S. Agudo, & K. Dore, State Bills of Rights

in 1787 and 1791: What Individual Rights Are Really Deeply Rooted in
American History and Tradition? 

, 1534–1535
(2012) (reporting that six State Constitutions had such provisions in
1787, rising to eight by 1791).
  17 1 The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, pp. 103–104 (M.

Farrand ed. 1966). See generally R. Beeman, Plain, Honest Men: The
                     Cite as: 

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                          ALITO, J., dissenting

scholars have concluded that the Take Care Clause was
meant to repudiate that authority.18 See 1 Works of James
Wilson 399, 440 (R. McCloskey ed. 1967) (describing Clause
as providing that the President holds “authority, not to
make, or alter, or dispense with the laws, but to execute and
act the laws”).
   Early decisions are inconsistent with the understanding
of Executive Power that appears to animate the majority.
In 1806, Justice Patterson, while presiding over a criminal
trial, rejected the argument that the President could au-
thorize the defendant to violate the law. United States v.
Smith, 

 (No. 16,342) (CC NY 1806).
He concluded:
        “The president of the United States cannot control
     the statute, nor dispense with its execution, and still
     less can he authorize a person to do what the law for-
     bids. If he could, it would render the execution of the
     laws dependent on his will and pleasure; which is a doc-
     trine that has not been set up, and will not meet with
     any supporters in our government. In this particular,
     the law is paramount.” 

.
  In Kendall v. United States ex rel. Stokes, 

(1838), the full Court rejected the President’s claim that he
had the authority to disregard a statutory duty to pay cer-
tain sums to a government contractor: “To contend that the
obligations imposed on the President to see the laws faith-
fully executed, implies a power to forbid their execution, is
——————
Making of the American Constitution 140 (2009) (describing debate over
the executive veto).
  18 See, e.g., Delahunty & Yoo, Dream On 803–804 (2013); Reinstein,

Limits 281; S. Prakash, The Essential Meaning of Executive Power, 

, 726, n. 113 (2003); C. May, Presidential Defiance of
“Unconstitutional” Laws: Reviving the Royal Prerogative 16 and n. 58
(1998); R. Reinstein, An Early View of Executive Powers and Privilege:
The Trial of Smith and Ogden, 2 Hastings Const. L. Q. 309, 320–321,
n. 50 (1975).
28                 UNITED STATES v. TEXAS

                       ALITO, J., dissenting

a novel construction of the constitution, and is entirely in-
admissible.” 

. This Court made the obvious con-
nection to the separation of powers: “vesting in the Presi-
dent a dispensing power” would result in “clothing the
President with a power entirely to control the legislation of
congress, and paralyze the administration of justice.” Ibid.;
see also Office of Personnel Management v. Richmond, 

 (1990) (White, J., concurring) (citing Kendall
to explain that the “Executive Branch does not have the dis-
pensing power on its own” and “should not be granted such
a power by judicial authorization”).
   The original understanding of the scope of the Executive’s
prosecutorial discretion was not briefed in this case, and I
am reluctant to express a firm position on the question. But
it is indisputable that we have been provided with no his-
torical support for the position taken by the Solicitor Gen-
eral or the majority.
                         *     *     *
   This sweeping Executive Power endorsed by today’s deci-
sion may at first be warmly received by champions of a
strong Presidential power, but if Presidents can expand
their powers as far as they can manage in a test of strength
with Congress, presumably Congress can cut executive
power as much as it can manage by wielding the formidable
weapons at its disposal. That is not what the Constitution
envisions.
   I end with one final observation. The majority suggests
that its decision rebuffs an effort to convince us to “ ‘usurp’ ”
the authority of the other branches, but that is not true.
Ante, at 3. We exercise the power conferred by Article III of
the Constitution, and we must be vigilant not to exceed the
limits of our constitutional role. But when we have juris-
diction, we have a “virtually unflagging obligation” to exer-
cise that authority. Colorado River Water Conservation
Dist. v. United States, 

 (1976). Because
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                     ALITO, J., dissenting

the majority shuns that duty, I must respectfully dissent.