A federal judge ruled against the Trump administration and ordered for 12,000 migrants to be allowed entry and resettlement in the U.S. after the government objected to an injunction from a prior ruling.
The Trump administration had estimated that the injunction would apply to only about 160 people, but U.S. District Judge Jamal Whitehead accused them of “interpretative jiggery-pokery” to exempt thousands.
‘The government is not free to disobey statutory and constitutional law — and the direct orders of this court and the Ninth Circuit.’
The migrants had their travel approved under the United States Refugee Admissions Program, but President Donald Trump ended the program with an executive order when he got into office in January.
Whitehead had issued a preliminary injunction against the administration ending the programs, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals partially ruled against him, saying that the Trump administration had the authority to determine immigration law. The court said that the ruling would not apply to migrants conditionally accepted to travel before the Jan. 20 order.
However, since the appeals court did not define what conditional acceptance meant, the government concluded that it only applied to 160 people, while Whitehead said it applied to more than 12,000 people.
“It is surprising that there could be any disagreement about the meaning of a judicial order that articulates three specific criteria in plain, straightforward language,” Whitehead wrote after the court clarified three conditions to meet the standard.
He also said the government was “hallucinating new text” into the appeals court order.
“This court will not entertain the government’s result-oriented rewriting of a judicial order that clearly says what it says,” the judge added. “The government is free, of course, to seek further clarification from the Ninth Circuit. But the government is not free to disobey statutory and constitutional law — and the direct orders of this court and the Ninth Circuit — while it seeks such clarification.”
Whitehead issued specific benchmarks that the government needed to meet in the coming weeks to fulfill his order to allow the migrants in question to settle in the U.S.
The refugee program was instituted in 1980 and is separate from the immigration policy that allows migrants to seek asylum in the U.S.
Judge Whitehead was appointed to the court by former President Joe Biden in 2023.
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