A federal appeals court on Friday upheld a law that would ban TikTok in the U.S. unless the app’s Chinese parent company sells the platform.

A panel of three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously declined to review the petition for relief from TikTok.

“We conclude the portions of the Act the petitioners have standing to challenge, that is the provisions concerning TikTok and its related entities, survive constitutional scrutiny,” judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote in the majority opinion. “We therefore deny the petitions.”

“The First Amendment exists to protect free speech in the United States,” Ginsburg said. “Here the Government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.”

U.S. officials, including leaders at the Justice Department, have said TikTok poses a national security threat of “immense depth and scale” due to its relationship with the Chinese Communist Party.

The company had unsuccessfully argued that the ban infringes on its First Amendment rights and that the law requiring divestment from ByteDance is “not possible technologically, commercially, or legally,” particularly by the January 19 deadline. 

Both the U.S. government and TikTok had asked the appeals court to weigh in by Friday to allow time for any following steps or appeals to play out before the ban is slated to take effect next month.

The case is now likely to head to the Supreme Court, where justices could agree to hear the case and temporarily prevent the law from taking effect, or they could allow the appeals court’s ruling to stand.