The setback came despite sustained criticism from the Trump administration of the rulings; of federal district court judge James Robart, who issued the broadest nationwide injunction against the ruling; of the three-judge panel that upheld Robart’s injunction; of the Ninth Circuit as a whole; and of the federal judiciary. Those critiques ranged from challenges to the courts’ legitimacy to insinuations the judiciary would bear responsibility for future terrorist attacks.

“Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril,” Trump tweeted at one point. “If something bad happens blame him and court system.”

The president echoed those themes during his lengthy Thursday press conference, in which he insisted his presidency was operating like a “fine-tuned machine” and instead claimed it was the Ninth Circuit that was actually adrift. “That circuit is in chaos, and frankly that circuit is in turmoil,” Trump told reporters. He said he had heard the circuit was overturned 80 percent of the time by the Supreme Court—a highly misleading way to measure a court’s performance. (The Supreme Court, by design, reviews lower-court decisions for error or incongruity, not general quality; it also accepts only a handful of the thousands of cases decided by the Ninth Circuit each year.)

The White House did not reveal its plans until its filing Thursday, as it spent a week weighing whether it should continue to defend the order in the courts or start anew. Neither of its options for appeal seemed likely to succeed. The Trump administration could have asked a broader panel of the Ninth Circuit to reconsider the ruling, but two-thirds of the court’s judges were nominated by Democratic presidents—not a definitive measure of a court’s ideology, but not a heartening one for a Republican president, either. And if the administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, five votes from the eight justices would be needed to overturn the panel’s decision. Even if the four justices on the Court’s conservative wing sided with the administration, a fifth vote from its liberal wing could have been difficult to find.

The Ninth Circuit case, Washington v. Trump, is one of more than a dozen lawsuits challenging the ban’s legality across the country. But it quickly became the highest profile case after federal district judge James Robart issued a broad nationwide injunction on February 3 that temporarily barred the federal government from enforcing the order pending further hearings.

Justice Department lawyers quickly sought an emergency stay of Robart’s order from a three-judge appeals panel in the Ninth Circuit. The panel unanimously rejected that request on February 9, ruling that the states of Washington and Minnesota, which filed the lawsuit, had standing to challenge the order on behalf of students and faculty in their public-university systems.