Cite as: 509 U. S. 43 (1993)
Opinion of the Court
delegates to the INS the task of determining on a case-by-case basis whether each applicant has met all of the Act's conditions, not merely those interpreted by the regulations in question. In these circumstances, the promulgation of the challenged regulations did not itself give each CSS and LULAC class member a ripe claim; a class member's claim would ripen only once he took the affirmative steps that he could take before the INS blocked his path by applying the regulation to him.20
viding a historical basis for the further unchallenged allegation that the members "would have . . . bid on . . . designated set aside contracts but for the restrictions imposed by the [challenged] ordinance," ibid. (internal quotation marks omitted). A plaintiff in these cases can point to no similar history of application behavior to support a claim that "she would have applied . . . but for the invalid regulations," post, at 85; and we think the mere fact that she may have heard of the invalid regulations through a Qualified Designated Entity, a private attorney, or "word of mouth," post, at 80, insufficient proof of this counterfactual. Further, we defined the "injury in fact" in Associated General Contractors as "the inability to compete on an equal footing in the bidding process, not the loss of a contract," 508 U. S., at 666; thus, whether the association's members would have been awarded contracts but for the challenged ordinance was not immediately relevant. Here, the plaintiffs seek, not an equal opportunity to compete for adjustments of status, but the adjustments of status themselves. Under this circumstance, it becomes important to know whether they would be eligible for the adjustments but for the challenged regulations.
20 Justice O'Connor maintains that the plaintiffs' actions are now ripe because they have amended their complaints to seek the additional remedy of extending the application period, and the application period is now over. Post, at 71-72. We do not see how these facts establish ripeness. In both cases before us, the plaintiffs' underlying claim is that an INS regulation implementing the Reform Act is invalid. Because the Act requires each alien desiring legalization to take certain affirmative steps, and because the Act's conditions extend beyond those addressed by the challenged regulations, one cannot know whether the challenged regulation actually makes a concrete difference to a particular alien until one knows that he will take those affirmative steps and will satisfy the other conditions. Neither the fact that the application period is now over, nor the fact that the plaintiffs would now like the period to be extended, tells us anything about the willingness of the class members to take the required
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