A federal appeals court has declined to delay a law that would force TikTok’s Chinese parent company to divest the social-media app or else face a ban, paving the way for the latter option to take effect January 19.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia issued the order late Friday, one week after it unanimously upheld the law and rejected TikTok’s request to review its challenge. The decision rejects TikTok and parent ByteDance’s Monday emergency motion in which the companies ask the appeals court for more time to build their case for the Supreme Court. The court called the bid “unwarranted.”

Now, they must rush to get the Supreme Court to intervene. The justices could either agree to hear the case, thereby temporarily preventing the law from taking effect, or they could allow the appeals court’s ruling to stand.

TikTok and its parent company have unsuccessfully argued that the ban infringes on its First Amendment rights. If shut down, the short-form video platform would lose over 170 million domestic users.

“The petitioners rely upon their claims under the First Amendment to justify preliminarily enjoining the Act,” the D.C. court said in Friday’s order. “As to those claims, this court has already unanimously concluded the Act satisfies the requirements of the First Amendment under heightened scrutiny.”

The bill passed Congress with bipartisan support in April and was signed into law by President Joe Biden shortly thereafter. Federal lawmakers and the Justice Department were concerned that TikTok poses a national-security threat due to ByteDance’s relationship with the Chinese Communist Party.

Under the law, TikTok will be banned on U.S. app stores by January 19 unless it’s sold to an American buyer. If a sale is in progress by then, the company could receive a one-time, 90-day extension to finalize the divestiture.

The deadline comes one day before president-elect Donald Trump enters the White House for a second term. TikTok hopes Trump can intervene after he promised to “save” the video-hosting service during his 2024 campaign.

Trump could potentially help negotiate a deal for TikTok’s sale to an American company or several investors. The incoming president could also instruct his attorney general pick, Pam Bondi, to not enforce the law if he finds that TikTok has taken appropriate steps to distance itself from its China-based parent company.

Trump, a one-time TikTok critic who tried to ban it himself during his first term, has since opposed Congress’s efforts to ban the app in the U.S. He argued that a ban on TikTok would only benefit Facebook, which he called an “enemy of the people.”