jQuery insertAfter is not a function

I need to insert element to a Dom element outside for each:

$items1 = [];
$.each($('.qs-option-name'), function () {
   if($(this).find('span.highlighted').length === 1){
      $item  = $(this).parent().parent();
      console.log($item);
      $items1.push($item);
   }
 });
 console.log($items1);
 $items1.insertAfter('ul li.first');

console.log() inside for each:

console.log() outside for each:

Not sure looping an array again to insert is efficient is there a way to insert an array of DOM elements in one go?

The issue is because $items1 is an array of jQuery objects and therefore does not have a insertAfter() method.

To solve this you could create a jQuery object from the array:

$($items1).insertAfter('ul li.first');

Alternatively you can use add() to combine jQuery objects instead of creating a basic array:

var $items1 = $();
$('.qs-option-name').each(function() {
  if ($(this).find('span.highlighted').length === 1) {
    $item = $(this).parent().parent();
    $items1.add($item);
  }
});
$items1.insertAfter('ul li.first');

However you can make the logic more succinct using :has() and map():

var $items1 = $('.qs-option-name:has(span.highlighted)').map(function() {
  return $(this).parent().parent();
}).get();
$items1.insertAfter('ul li.first');

Note that the above is slightly different in that :has() will match any child, not only a single instance as your original did, but given the context that doesn't seem an important distinction.