Contending that the Trump Administration still intends to dismantle the CFPB, a federal judge on Friday issued a temporary injunction prohibiting the administration from firing employees without cause, prohibiting it from enforcing the stop work order or forcing employees to take administrative leave, and requiring it to provide employees with the means to perform their statutorily mandated functions.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote that the Trump Administration’s actions “were taken in complete disregard for the decision Congress made 15 years ago, which was spurred by the devastating financial crisis of 2008 and embodied in the United States Code, that the agency must exist and that it must perform specific functions to protect the borrowing public.”

“This is precisely the sort of situation preliminary injunctions were designed to address,” Berman wrote. “If the defendants are not enjoined, they will eliminate the agency before the Court has the opportunity to decide whether the law permits them to do it, and as the defendants’ own witness warned, the harm will be irreparable.”

The union representing CFPB employees, several other groups and a pastor have filed suit against the bureau and Acting Director Russell Vought seeking an order that would prohibit the CFPB from doing any work to stop the agency’s operations.

In the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the plaintiffs ask the court to order the CFPB to resume all activities they said the bureau is required to perform under federal law, asserting a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act and a non-statutory right to seek to enjoin and have declared unlawful agency action that is ultra vires (beyond the agency’s legal power or authority).

Jackson wrote that testimony and documents the agency produced at the last minute demonstrating that it was not dismantling the CFPB amounted to window dressing and that the Trump Administration still is planning to dismantle the CFPB.

“Absent an injunction freezing the status quo – preserving the agency’s data, its operational capacity, and its workforce – there is a substantial risk that the defendants will complete the destruction of the agency completely in violation of law well before the Court can rule on the merits, and it will be impossible to rebuild,” Jackson wrote. The Mayor and City Council of Baltimore have filed a similar suit. That suit is pending in the U.S. District for the District of Maryland, although the court in that case declined to grant the Mayor and City’s request for a preliminary injunction.