A federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that the Trump administration can continue to send Central American migrants to Mexico while their amnesty applications are being reviewed in the U.S.

The ruling by the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco comes as the government is appealing a lower court ruling that found the policy to be a violation of U.S. immigration law.

The program, which began in January, was one of several Trump administration policies aimed at curtailing the number of migrants — many of them families from Central America — arriving on the Southern U.S border with Mexico.

Since it began, more than 3,000 migrants have been sent back to Mexico from the United States.

In their ruling, the judges wrote that the Department of Homeland Security, “is likely to suffer irreparable harm absent a stay because the preliminary injunction takes off the table one of the few congressionally authorized measures available to process the approximately 2,000 migrants who are currently arriving at the nation’s southern border on a daily basis.”

With Wires