BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD) — A federal appeals court will let Louisiana continue to house juvenile justice inmates at the campus of Louisiana State Prison, at least temporarily.

On Friday, Sept. 8, Chief U.S. District Shelley Dick ordered that the state move juvenile justice detainees out of the former death row at Angola to different facilities no later than Friday, Sept. 15. The state asked her to stay that preliminary injunction in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana, and Dick denied the request this week.

“The youth at Angola are being victimized, traumatized, and seriously and irreparably harmed,” Dick said in her ruling ordering that they be moved.

She noted that “the conditions of confinement of the youth incarcerated at Angola constitute cruel and unusual punishment, and the punitive atmosphere and systemic programming failures violate the Fourteenth Amendment.”

The order to move the minors was appealed to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

In a court document filed on Wednesday, Sept. 13, attorneys representing Gov. John Bel Edwards and the Office of Juvenile Justice noted: “Though the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals today granted an administrative stay of the Preliminary Injunction, the administrative stay is not for a definite period of time and, therefore, Defendants must continue in their efforts to comply with the terms of the Preliminary Injunction.”

The state has argued that the youths being held at Bridge City Center for Youth at West Feliciana are among the most dangerous and there’s not currently a facility with strong enough security to hold them. The plan, OJJ Deputy Secretary Curtis Nelson Jr. has said, was to move them out from Angola as soon as a new maximum-security facility for youth is completed in Monroe.

On Tuesday, Sept. 12, attorneys representing the minors filed a request with the court to make OJJ communicate about where their clients are. They said they’ve been prevented from visiting clients and haven’t been able to communicate with them and asked for the court’s expedited aid by 5 p.m. Wednesday.

The state responded that the request for a visit was made Tuesday and expected to be carried out Thursday, Sept. 14. The attorneys were asked to visit on a later date because of ongoing efforts to comply with moving the detainees, they said, but no one was denied access to counsel. They argue there’s no need for expediting consideration of the issue.

No response from the court has been filed in the federal court records system as of the filing of this article.