Appeals Court Pulls Judge Off Mississippi Anti-DEI Case Over Fabricated Facts and AI-Style Errors

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has taken a federal judge off a lawsuit challenging Mississippi’s anti-DEI law, finding that his rulings rested on false facts, a case citation that appears to have been invented by artificial intelligence, and twisted readings of Supreme Court precedent.

The appeals court threw out U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate’s preliminary injunction that had blocked the law and ordered the case handed to a different judge, a remarkable rebuke. Writing for the panel, Judge Jerry Smith said the judge “carelessly exercised his Article III power by issuing sloppy edicts based on falsehoods and fabrications,” adding that the court “or perhaps, being charitable, its AI agent” ignored and manipulated governing law, apparently to serve a policy agenda. Both judges were appointed by President Ronald Reagan.

The lawsuit was brought by teachers, parents, and students who argued that Mississippi’s limits on DEI practices in public schools and universities violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Wingate granted a temporary restraining order in July, then swapped it out two days later after state officials pointed out serious factual mistakes.

That first order named 11 people and groups as plaintiffs who had nothing to do with the case, wrongly listed two officials as defendants, and claimed without evidence that three schools had already dropped DEI programs because of the law. It also relied on declarations from four people who were not in the record and who, according to the Fifth Circuit, “may not even exist.” It even quoted language as coming from the law that the law does not contain. Smith noted the court was “lucky” the state had filed a copy of the original order, since Wingate had kept it out of public view.

The corrected order was not clean either. It cited a case that does not exist, which the appeals court called “an apparent AI hallucination,” and which Smith said was arguably part of the flawed reasoning behind the preliminary injunction as well. Wingate later admitted that a law clerk had used AI to help write the restraining order, but he called the errors clerical and insisted they did not change his core reasoning or decision. The Fifth Circuit rejected that, questioning how errors so widespread could leave the legal analysis untouched.

The panel also faulted how Wingate handled binding Supreme Court rulings. Under the 2024 decision in Moody v. NetChoice, a court weighing a facial First Amendment challenge must decide whether a law’s unconstitutional applications substantially outweigh its constitutional ones. Wingate twice described that test as only “supposedly” required, which Smith said “calls into question whether he even tried in good faith to follow the law.”

The court likewise dismissed Wingate’s view that uncertainty and the risk of serious consequences were enough to halt enforcement. “That gets the entire law of injunctive relief completely backwards,” Smith wrote, explaining that a preliminary injunction cannot survive merely because success on the merits is possible.

Wingate’s use of the Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling in Trump v. CASA, which limits injunctions to the relief needed to protect the plaintiffs, drew another sharp correction. Wingate had cited it to justify treating injunctions as all-or-nothing. “That is almost exactly the opposite of what CASA says,” Smith wrote, noting the high court had warned against overbroad relief.

The Fifth Circuit vacated the injunction and sent the case back to the Southern District of Mississippi with instructions that a new judge take it over. The challenge to the law will go on, but Wingate’s order blocking Mississippi’s anti-DEI law is gone, and he will no longer oversee the case.