The Fifth Circuit removed a Mississippi judge from an anti-DEI case after calling his injunction a botch job built on falsehoods and an apparent AI hallucination.
A federal appeals court has vacated a preliminary injunction that blocked Mississippi’s law restricting DEI practices in public schools and universities, and ordered the dispute reassigned to a new judge. The panel’s opinion, written by Judge Jerry Smith, described the district court’s work in blunt terms and said the handling could not stand.
Fox News reported that the Fifth Circuit sent the case back to the Southern District of Mississippi for a different judge to take over, an extraordinary step the court rarely invokes.
Plaintiffs in the suit, described as a group of teachers, parents, and students, argued the state law violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Mississippi officials defended the statute and flagged serious problems in the temporary restraining order that first froze the law.
Judge Smith did not mince words about Judge Henry Wingate’s orders. Both men are Reagan appointees. Smith wrote that the district judge had mishandled core duties from the bench.
Smith stated:
"This district judge carelessly exercised his Article III power by issuing sloppy edicts based on falsehoods and fabrications,"
He went further on the source of the mess and the apparent purpose behind it.
"the district court, or perhaps, being charitable, its AI agent, ignored and manipulated governing law, apparently to satisfy a policy agenda."
That pairing, false facts plus bent law, drove the decision to wipe out the injunction and move the case.
The problems started with the temporary restraining order issued in July. Mississippi officials spotted major factual errors almost immediately. Wingate replaced the order two days later.
The original TRO identified 11 individuals and organizations as plaintiffs who were never part of the case. It named two officials as defendants who did not belong there. It claimed, without support, that three schools had already canceled DEI programs because of the law.
It also leaned on purported declarations from four people who did not appear anywhere in the record and “may not even exist.” The order attributed language to the bill that does not appear in the law, including references to “race or sex stereotyping,” “race or sex scapegoating,” “critical race theory,” and “institutional bias.”
Smith noted the court was fortunate the defense preserved the paper trail.
"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,"
Wingate later acknowledged that a law clerk had used artificial intelligence to help draft the TRO. The corrected version still contained a citation to a nonexistent case, what the appeals court treated as an apparent AI hallucination.
Wingate argued the errors were “clerical” and did not affect the court’s “core legal reasoning or the ultimate judgment on the merits.” The Fifth Circuit questioned how so many mistaken facts could fail to touch the reasoning or the judgment.
Factual invention is not a formatting glitch. Naming phantom parties, citing missing declarations, and rewriting the statute’s text go to whether a court is finding facts or manufacturing them.
The panel also faulted Wingate’s reading of recent Supreme Court decisions. On Moody v. NetChoice (2024), Smith said the district court treated the required framework as optional in tone and substance.
"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 added:
"The district court’s laxity in observing the binding authority of the Supreme Court is yet another reason to doom the preliminary injunction,"
On the law of injunctions, the appeals court said the district court had the standard backwards. A preliminary injunction cannot rest on a mere possibility of success on the merits. Smith put it directly:
"That gets the entire law of injunctive relief completely backwards,"
And:
"A preliminary injunction cannot stand just because there is a possibility of success on the merits,"
The same pattern appeared in the treatment of Trump v. CASA (2025), which limits overbroad relief and tells judges to tailor orders to what is strictly necessary. Smith said the district court’s approach ran the other way.
"That is almost exactly the opposite of what CASA says,"
He explained what the high court actually warned against: overbroad relief, and the duty to cut an order down to what is absolutely necessary and nothing more.
Vacating the injunction restored the status of Mississippi’s DEI limits while the case proceeds. Ordering a new judge is the sharper remedy. It signals that the record was too compromised for the same chambers to continue.
State officials who flagged the errors forced the original TRO into the open as an exhibit. Without that filing, the first order might have stayed buried. The appeals court treated that transparency as essential to cleaning up the mess.
The underlying dispute remains live: whether Mississippi may restrict DEI-related practices in its public schools and universities, and whether the plaintiffs’ First and Fourteenth Amendment claims can overcome that policy choice. What will not continue is Wingate’s injunction or his control of the case.
When a district court fills an order with parties who were never there, quotes a statute that does not say those words, cites a case that does not exist, and inverts Supreme Court limits on injunctions, an appeals court has one clean job left, strike the order and hand the file to someone else.
