Cite as: 509 U. S. 43 (1993)
Opinion of the Court
As respondents argue, see Brief for Respondents 17, n. 23, a class member whose application was "front-desked" would have felt the effects of the "advance parole" or "facially valid document" regulation in a particularly concrete manner, for his application for legalization would have been blocked then and there; his challenge to the regulation should not fail for lack of ripeness. Front-desking would also have a further, and untoward, consequence for jurisdictional purposes, for it would effectively exclude an applicant from access even to the limited administrative and judicial review procedures established by the Reform Act. He would have no formal denial to appeal to the Associate Commissioner for Examinations, nor would he have an opportunity to build an administrative record on which judicial review might be based.24 Hence, to construe § 1255a(f)(1) to bar district court jurisdiction over his challenge, we would have to impute to Congress an intent to preclude judicial review of the legality of INS action entirely under those circumstances. As we stated recently in McNary, however, there is a "well-the class definition, which is much broader, see supra, at 48-49; rather, it is part of the requirements class members must meet to obtain one of the forms of relief ordered by the District Court. We understand the LULAC class definition to use the word "apply" to mean "have an application accepted for filing by the INS," as under this reading the definition encompasses all those whom the INS refuses to treat as having timely applied (which is the refusal that lies at the heart of the parties' dispute), and as the definition then includes those who "learned of their ineligibility" by being front-desked, since it would be odd to exclude those who learned of their ineligibility in the most direct way possible from this description. As we note below, however, see n. 29, infra, we believe that the word "applied" as used in § 1255a(a)(1)(A) has a broader meaning than that given to the word in the LULAC class definition.
24 The Reform Act limits judicial review to "the administrative record established at the time of the review by the appellate authority." 8 U. S. C. § 1255a(f)(4)(B). In addition, an INS regulation provides that a legalization application may not "be filed or reopened before an immigration judge or the Board of Immigration Appeals during exclusion or deportation proceedings." 8 CFR § 103.3(a)(3)(iii) (1992).
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