A panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has limited the scope of its prior injunction blocking changes to rules that would force non-Mexican asylum seekers arriving at the southern border to wait in Mexico while their asylum applications are pending.

A divided Ninth Circuit panel last week upheld a lower court's injunction against the Trump administration's "Migrant Protection Protocols," finding that policies were not authorized by Congress under the Immigration and Nationality Act, and even had they been, they didn't meet the government's obligation to avoid returning any alien to a territory where his or her "life or freedom would be threatened."

On Wednesday, the two judges in the panel's majority, Judges Richard Paez and William Fletcher of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit partially granted the government's request for a stay. Noting that "the proper scope of injunctions against agency action is a matter of intense and active controversy," the court limited the injunction to the circuit's geographical boundaries.

In the court's initial Feb 28 opinion, Fletcher wrote that it was a "misnomer" to refer to the injunction as "nationwide injunction" since the protocols only apply at the four states along the Southern border⁠—California and Arizona in the Ninth Circuit, New Mexico in the Tenth, and Texas in the Fifth. "In practical effect, the district court's injunction, while setting aside the MPP in its entirety, does not operate nationwide," Fletcher wrote. The judge further noted that immigration cases present a "particularly strong claim for uniform relief."

In Wednesday's order, the majority wrote: "While we regard the merits of our decision … as clearly correct, we do not have the same level of confidence with respect to the scope of the injunction entered by the district court."

Judge Ferdinand Fernandez of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, who dissented from the panels prior opinion, concurred in the portions of Wednesday's order granting a stay to the government and giving the government until March 11 to seek a further stay from the U.S. Supreme Court, but otherwise dissented.

Judy Rabinovitz, special counsel in the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project who represents the plaintiffs challenging the changes said, said in a prepared statement that her clients agree with the panel that "it is 'very clear' that the MPP violates federal law, and 'it is equally clear that the MPP is causing extreme and irreversible harm.'"

"If the administration had any respect for the law or any sense of decency, it would end this program immediately," Rabinovitz said.