The Department of Justice plans to ask the U.S. Supreme Court this week to weigh in on its rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, bypassing the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Last week, U.S. District Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California temporarily blocked the Trump administration's rescission of the DACA policy. The DOJ filed a notice of appeal to the Ninth Circuit in that case Tuesday, but U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement the DOJ also wants the Supreme Court to rule on the merits of the case. He said it “defies both law and common sense” that a “single district court in San Francisco” could order the reinstallation of the DACA program.

“We are now taking the rare step of requesting direct review on the merits of this injunction by the Supreme Court so that this issue may be resolved quickly and fairly for all the parties involved,” Sessions said.

The plaintiffs in the consolidated cases, who include the University of California system, are represented by a team of lawyers from Covington & Burling as well as Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, among others.

The DOJ and President Donald Trump lambasted Alsup last week for his decision. Alsup's ruling follows several others that have been unfavorable to the Trump administration in the Northern California court and the Ninth Circuit, including decisions upholding injunctions against the third iteration of the travel ban executive order and the sanctuary cities executive order.

“It just shows everyone how broken and unfair our Court System is when the opposing side in a case (such as DACA) always runs to the 9th Circuit and almost always wins before being reversed by higher courts,” the president tweeted last week.

Sessions announced in September last year that the administration would rescind the DACA policy on the grounds it was illegal to begin with. He cited the Supreme Court's 4-4 split in 2016 on the issue, which left in place a Fifth Circuit ruling against a similar program for immigrant parents and an expansion of the DACA program.

Several lawsuits have been filed in multiple courts over the action ever since the administration's announcement. In addition to the cases in California, a similar set of related suits are pending at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. DOJ has filed an appeal with the Second Circuit in that case on whether the decision to rescind DACA qualifies as agency discretion.

Steven Goldblatt, faculty director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown University Law Center, said the high court has only skipped appellate review a “handful” of times in the last century.

“[The government] is going to have to articulate to the court that there's an urgency to having the court decide it that warrants accelerating the process and eliminating the court of appeals,” he said.