President Obama may not be able to fully implement his highly touted executive orders on immigration after a federal court ruling guaranteed that the case will be tied up in the judiciary until next year.

Justice Department officials are appealing the Fifth Circuit Court’s decision that the immigration programs are unconstitutional, putting the case on pace for a final resolution in the Supreme Court next summer. In the event that Obama wins, Department of Homeland Security officials would have just months to implement the policy before he leaves office.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest acknowledged the time crunch. “I don’t think the expectation would be that we’d get 5 million applications on the first day,” he told reporters Tuesday. “We would move forward on as aggressive a timeframe as we could.”

House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.) hailed the Fifth Circuit’s decision as “a victory for the Constitution and the American people” in a statement Monday night. “The president himself stated over 20 times that he does not have the authority to change immigration laws on his own yet he did so anyway,” he said. “Such lawlessness must be stopped so that we preserve the separation of powers in the Constitution and protect individual liberty.”

Congressional Republicans worry that the Department of Homeland Security is planning to get around the court orders by issuing new regulations that would have similar affects, based on leaked memos that outlined a series of potential policy changes. “It appears as though individuals in your Department could be actively engaged in attempting to skirt the injunction issued in February by the District Court for the Southern District of Texas,” Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) wrote to Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson in a letter released Friday.

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