By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) -A federal appeals court on Monday allowed the U.S. Department of Education to proceed with plans to lay off civil rights staff as it paused an injunction that the Trump administration said should have been removed after a U.S. Supreme Court decision.
A three-judge panel of the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals put on hold an injunction that President Donald Trump’s administration opposed. The injunction by U.S. District Judge Myong Joun ordered the Education Department to reinstate staff in its Office for Civil Rights.
Joun declined in mid-August to lift the injunction. But the Trump administration argued that decision defied a Supreme Court ruling in July that allowed the government to fire 1,300 Education Department employees.
The Department of Justice asked the 1st Circuit to intervene so it did not have to go back to the Supreme Court.
The Education Department and lawyers for the plaintiffs challenging the cuts did not respond to requests for comment.
Both cases followed a March announcement by Secretary of Education Linda McMahon of a mass layoff that would cut in half the staff of a department that Trump has called for shuttering, which only Congress could ultimately authorize.
Joun, an appointee of Democratic President Joe Biden, in May blocked the department-wide job cuts at the behest of a group of Democratic-led states, school districts and teachers’ unions. But on appeal, the 6-3 conservative majority U.S. Supreme Court on July 14 lifted Joun’s injunction.
That decision, though, did not address a narrower injunction Joun later issued covering just the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which enforces federal civil rights laws in schools and was facing a loss of half of its 550 employees.
Those cuts were challenged by two students and the Victim Rights Law Center, which represents sexual assault victims. Citing the Supreme Court’s order, the Justice Department said the injunction those plaintiffs won could no longer stand.
In declining to lift it, Joun called the Supreme Court’s brief July order “unreasoned,” echoing a critique by other lower-court judges of the short orders emanating from the high court’s emergency docket, also called the “shadow docket.”
The Justice Department said Joun’s “disregard of the Supreme Court’s ruling represents an affront to the Supreme Court’s authority.”
The 1st Circuit panel, comprised entirely of Biden appointees, on Monday paused the injunction, calling the cases similar.
U.S. Circuit Judge Seth Aframe concurred but warned that the “unreasoned” Supreme Court order’s “import will be limited as this case moves ahead,” as the courts weigh whether the layoffs unlawfully impeded the office’s functions.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Cynthia Osterman)
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