‘Unified on a fundamental belief’: 27 religious groups band together to sue Trump over immigration policies that interfere with ‘welcoming the stranger, or immigrant’

President Donald Trump arrives to sign the Laken Riley Act in the East Room of the White House, Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

The Trump administration is asking a federal appeals court to block a directive from a lower court ordering the government to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid funds by midnight on Wednesday.

The Wednesday morning filing with the U.S. Circuit Court in Washington, D.C., came less than a day after U.S. District Judge Amir H. Ali issued an order to enforce his previous directive prohibiting the administration from implementing its across-the-board freeze on such payments.

The coalition of aid groups that filed the lawsuit last month presented evidence that U.S. State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) had repeatedly failed to abide by the district court’s underlying order during an emergency hearing Tuesday morning.

At one point during the proceedings, Ali lost patience with the government’s attorney as the court requested details regarding why the temporary restraining order was being flouted by the administration.

A frustrated Ali concluded the hearing with a series of onerous directions to enforce compliance with the temporary restraining order unfreezing the funds for contract payments on work completed before Feb. 13, 2025.

“I don’t know why I can’t get a straight answer from you,” the judge intoned, according to a courtroom report by Politico journalist Kyle Cheney. “Are you aware of an unfreezing of the disbursement of funds for those contracts and agreements that were frozen before Feb. 13?”

The government lawyer replied: “I’m not in a position to answer that.”

That back-and-forth set the tone for the arguments between the U.S. Department of Justice and the nonprofit plaintiffs in the case.

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