A federal appeals court on Tuesday paused a lower court’s decision that blocked the Trump administration from rejecting new refugees, a small victory for the White House in its efforts to reshape immigration policy.
A three-judge panel in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals comprising two Republican and one Democratic appointee said anyone conditionally approved by the government as a refugee before President Donald Trump took office must be allowed to keep their refugee status and enter the country. But Trump had the authority to halt acceptance of all new refugees, the panel found.
The panel’s decision is a temporary stay of a lower court’s preliminary injunction, and the stay will remain in effect through at least the end of April while the case plays out in the appellate court.
The case centers on a lawsuit brought in February by faith-based nonprofit groups and numerous refugees and their family members challenging Trump’s executive order titled “Realigning the United States Refugee Admissions Program.”
Citing the U.S.’s inability to “absorb large numbers of migrants,” the order indefinitely suspended the government’s acceptance of new refugees into the country, a practice that was established through the Refugee Act in 1980.
The plaintiffs shared their stories in court filings, including an Idaho mother who was a U.S. citizen waiting to be reunited with her daughter. The daughter applied from South Africa to move to the U.S. as a refugee, and her application had been pending for years before Trump took office.
The plaintiffs’ lawsuit argued that the executive order and subsequent freeze on all money the government normally paid nonprofit groups to resettle refugees in the U.S. violated the Refugee Act.
Trump’s actions “have placed the lives of hundreds of thousands of refugees on hold, left families separated without hope of reuniting, threatened the survival of those who recently arrived in the United States, created an existential crisis for the nonprofit organizations that serve them, and left the future of the [refugee resettlement program] hanging in the balance,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote.
Judge Jamal Whitehead, a former President Joe Biden appointee serving in Washington State, temporarily blocked the executive order in February, saying it improperly nullified a congressionally established program. This week, Whitehead issued a second preliminary injunction requiring the administration to continue fulfilling its contracts with refugee resettlement programs. The Ninth Circuit has not addressed that injunction.
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The case is one of dozens across the country in which the Trump administration is testing the president’s ability to shrink and align the executive branch with his policy priorities, which include lowering legal and illegal immigration levels.
“Applicable law empowers the President to limit the entry of aliens into the country, and that power is heightened in the context of refugees,” Department of Justice attorneys argued in their court filings in the refugee case.