A federal appeals court removed Judge Henry Wingate from a Mississippi anti-DEI case after vacating his injunction and condemning what it called a botch job built on falsehoods.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit vacated a preliminary injunction that had blocked the state’s law restricting DEI practices in public schools and universities. The panel ordered the case reassigned to a different judge in the Southern District of Mississippi.
Fox News reported that the opinion, written by Judge Jerry Smith, tore into Wingate’s handling of the temporary restraining order and the later injunction. Plaintiffs, a group of teachers, parents, and students, had sued Mississippi officials, claiming the law violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Wingate, a Reagan appointee, put the law on hold. The appeals court said his work did not hold up.
Smith did not say much about how the district court used its power.
"This district judge carelessly exercised his Article III power by issuing sloppy edicts based on falsehoods and fabrications,"
Smith wrote. He went further on the legal analysis itself.
"the district court, or perhaps, being charitable, its AI agent, ignored and manipulated governing law, apparently to satisfy a policy agenda."
The trouble started with the temporary restraining order Wingate issued in July. Mississippi officials flagged major factual errors. Two days later, he replaced it.
The original TRO named 11 individuals and organizations as plaintiffs who were never part of the case. It incorrectly listed two officials as defendants. It claimed three schools had already canceled DEI programs because of the law, claims the record did not support.
Worse, the order cited purported declarations from four people who did not appear anywhere in the record and “may not even exist.” It also attributed language to the bill that does not appear in the statute, including references to “race or sex stereotyping,” “race or sex scapegoating,” “critical race theory,” and “institutional bias.”
Smith noted that Wingate kept the original TRO from public view. The defendants later attached a copy as an exhibit to their July 28 motion.
"We are grateful, and, indeed, lucky, that the defendants provided a copy of the original TRO as an exhibit in their July 28 motion, ECF 58-1, given that Judge Wingate kept it from public view,"
Smith wrote.
Even the corrected TRO had a citation to a nonexistent case while discussing the relationship between TROs and preliminary injunctions. The Fifth Circuit called it “an apparent AI hallucination” and said the fabricated citation was “arguably part of the shoddy reasoning of the preliminary injunction, too.”
After public accusations of AI use, Wingate acknowledged that a law clerk used artificial intelligence to help draft the TRO. He described the errors as “clerical” and said they did not affect the court’s “core legal reasoning or the ultimate judgment on the merits.”
The appeals court pushed back hard on that explanation, questioning how so many mistaken facts could not at least marginally affect core legal reasoning or the support for the judgment.
Smith also faulted Wingate for mishandling binding Supreme Court authority. In Moody v. NetChoice (2024), the Court set a two-step test: to strike down an entire law, unconstitutional applications must substantially outweigh constitutional ones. Wingate twice called that Moody framework “supposedly” required.
"That Judge Wingate twice refers to the Moody framework as ‘supposedly’ required calls into question whether he even tried in good faith to follow the law,"
Smith wrote. He added that the district court’s “laxity in observing the binding authority of the Supreme Court is yet another reason to doom the preliminary injunction.”
Wingate reasoned that a court “should pause when faced with an unsettled area with such dire possible consequences.” Smith said that gets the entire law of injunctive relief completely backwards. A preliminary injunction cannot stand just because there is a possibility of success on the merits.
On Trump v. CASA (2025), Wingate cited the decision in concluding that injunctions like the one before him “should be all-or-nothing renditions.” Smith answered that this was almost exactly the opposite of what CASA says. The quoted portion was the Supreme Court’s caution against overbroad relief and its instruction that judges tailor relief to what is absolutely necessary and nothing more.
The Fifth Circuit called the overall handling a “botch job.” Reassigning the case to a different judge is an “extraordinary” and “rarely invoked” step. The panel took it anyway. The dispute now returns to the Southern District of Mississippi for a new judge to consider the challenge to the state’s anti-DEI law.
Mississippi enacted the measure to restrict DEI-related practices in its public schools and universities. The plaintiffs wanted the courts to stop that policy cold. Wingate obliged with an injunction. The Fifth Circuit stripped that injunction away and removed him from the matter after documenting false parties, nonexistent declarations, phantom statutory language, a hallucinated citation, and a reading of Supreme Court precedent that ran the other direction.
Both Wingate and Smith are Reagan appointees. The dispute was not about party labels. It was about whether a district court can freeze a duly enacted state law with orders riddled with basic factual inventions and legal inversions.
When a judge blocks a state’s education policy with phantom parties and a fabricated citation, higher courts are right to take the case away and demand the law be applied as written.
