Seattle, Washington - A judge on Monday ordered President Donald Trump to admit around 12,000 refugees into the US, a blow to his administration's efforts to dismantle the right to asylum.

The order clarifies the limits imposed by an appeals court ruling which allowed the Trump administration to suspend the refugee admissions system, but said it must admit people already granted refugee status with travel plans to the US.

The Trump administration argued at a hearing last week that it should only have to admit 160 refugees who were scheduled to travel within two weeks of an executive order in January halting the system.

But US District Judge Jamal Whitehead overruled the claim on Monday, saying "the government's interpretation is, to put it mildly, 'interpretive jiggerypokery' of the highest order."

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"It requires not just reading between the lines" of the appeal decision "but hallucinating new text that simply is not there," Whitehead wrote in his order.

Whitehead had originally blocked Trump's executive order halting refugee admissions, ruling in February that it likely violated the 1980 Refugee Act. His decision was overruled by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals a month later.

"Had the Ninth Circuit intended to impose a two-week limitation – one that would reduce the protected population from about 12,000 to 160 individuals – it would have done so explicitly," Whitehead wrote.

"This Court will not entertain the government's result-oriented rewriting of a judicial order that clearly says what it says," he added.

The lawsuit had been brought by Jewish refugee non-profit HIAS, Christian group Church World Service, Lutheran Community Services Northwest, and other individuals.

Those nonprofits said in their February lawsuit that several people who had been about to travel, having sold all their belongings in their own country, were abruptly left in limbo by Trump's order.

Refugee resettlement had been one of the few legal routes to eventual US citizenship, and had been embraced by former President Joe Biden, who expanded eligibility for the program to include people affected by climate change.

Trump's White House campaign was marked by vitriol about immigrants. He has since launched a draconian program of mass deportations, defying courts and judges in the process.