The Associated Press / Attorney and founder of Avenging the Ancestors Coalition Michael Coard speaks during a rally celebrating the reinstallation of a slavery exhibit at the President’s House Site in Philadelphia on Thursday.

PHILADELPHIA — A U.S. appeals court late Friday said the Trump administration can halt work on a National Park Service slavery exhibit in Philadelphia while it appeals an order to reinstall it.

About half of the large panels at the outdoor exhibit have been restored this week at the site of the former President’s House on Independence Mall. U.S. Circuit Judge Thomas Hardiman, in his order, said the exhibit as it stood Friday must remain in place and the remaining materials must be preserved. The appeals court will now weigh the dispute between the city and the federal government, which began when the administration abruptly removed the exhibit in January, amid an effort to remove information it deems “disparaging” to Americans from federal properties.

Senior U.S. District Judge Cynthia M. Rufe had set a 5 p.m. Friday deadline to restore exhibits on the lives of nine people enslaved at the site under former President George Washington in the 1790s, when Philadelphia served as the nation’s capital. That order is now on hold.

The Park Service describes the exhibit as one “that examines the paradox between slavery and freedom in the founding of the nation.”

The Interior Department has said in court papers that it planned to replace it with its own narrative on slavery. Rufe had said it must work with the city on any new material under a longstanding cooperative agreement.

“(T)he government can convey a different message without restraint elsewhere if it so pleases, but it cannot do so to the President’s House until it follows the law and consults with the city,” Rufe, an appointee of Republican President George W. Bush, wrote in an opinion Friday.

In its own filing Friday to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the Justice Department called her ruling “extraordinary” and “an improper intrusion on the workings of a co-equal branch of government.”

One of the panels being rehung Friday morning — titled “History Lost & Found” — details the surprising discovery of artifacts from the President’s House during an archaeological dig in the early 2000s, as work was being done on a new pavilion for the Liberty Bell.

The exhibit had been on display since 2010, the result of years of research and collaboration between the city, the Park Service, historians and other private parties.