A Washington, D.C. federal judge has delivered a “crushing defeat” of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, ruling that the Trump-appointee illegally delayed Obama-era regulations to provide loan relief to students defrauded by for-profit colleges.

U.S. District Court Judge Randolph Moss, in a 57-page ruling (pdf) issued Wednesday, sided with consumer advocates and a coalition of 19 Democratic states attorneys general, determining that DeVos’s actions to delay the borrower defense rule were “unlawful,” “procedurally invalid,” and “arbitrary and capricious.”

In terms of DeVos’s broader and deeply unpopular agenda for the Education Department, Politico characterized the decision as “the most significant legal setback to date for DeVos’s efforts to dismantle the Obama administration’s higher education policies.”

“This is a major victory for student borrowers and for anyone who cares about having a government that operates under the rule of law, instead of as a pawn of the for-profit college industry,” said Toby Merrill, director of Project on Predatory Student Lending, which partnered with Public Citizen and the states attorneys general to file suit on behalf of two former students at the for-profit New England Institute of Art (NEIA) in Brookline, Massachusetts. 

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey—who led the coalition of state attorneys general for the lawsuit—responding in a series of tweets, called the ruling “a total rejection of President [Donald] Trump and Betsy DeVos’s agenda to cheat students and taxpayers.”