The Department of Defense has directed that up to 600 military lawyers be assigned as temporary immigration judges. The Defense Department is scouring the ranks of lawyers in the active component, National Guard, and Reserves to plug holes in the ability of the administration to jump through the legal hoops necessary before illegals are deported.
The first 150 lawyers are supposed to show up at the Department of Justice the week of September 8, presumably for orientation training. They will be detailed to the Department of Homeland Security for 179 days, to avoid paying them for a permanent move, and that detail can be renewed.
Military lawyers can fill in for immigration judges because those positions are Article II, that is, executive branch, not judicial appointments.
There are currently about 600 immigration judges. Over 100 were fired or left voluntarily after the Trump administration took office, as they decided to take action rather than simply playing rope-a-dope with the cases assigned to them. There are currently 3.45 million immigration cases pending. There have been 466,942 new cases received in FY2025, and 810,417 cases have been closed. This compares to only 19,792 cases closed in all of FY21, when there were more judges than today.
Naturally, there is a lot of mewling and bleating going on from the experts who see this as a preview of Armageddon or something.
[Jennifer Peyton, who was a supervising immigration judge until she was dropkicked in July] doubted that military attorneys would be able to master the complexities of immigration law without that rigorous process. She also said it wasn’t clear how they would handle the hundreds, or sometimes thousands, of cases on just a Chicago immigration judge’s docket each year.
“Six months is barely enough time to start to figure out the firehose of information and training,” she said.
Peyton also was concerned that Trump’s move didn’t supply more administrative workers, including translators, whom judges rely on to make decisions. The stakes, she said, were life or death for people who would come before the new judges.
“None of it makes sense unless you were intentionally trying to weaken the immigration courts,” Peyton said.
Some toad in the Pentagon whined:
But the use of military lawyers has raised concern, another person familiar with the planning said — speaking like the others on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation — that those officers may not have experience with immigration court proceedings or may receive insufficient training for complicated and potentially life-altering deportation hearings.
I'd suggest that she take another look at the situation.
Some number of the lawyers called to active duty, and most of the 600 will be Reserve officers, will practice immigration law. Most cases will be straightforward illegal entry or visa overstay cases. A lot will be for deportation after a criminal conviction. With even a midwit level of triage, the easy cases can be disposed of by a temporary immigration judge, and speed up the process. This will allow experienced judges to focus on more difficult cases. It will also provide a feeder system to fill vacancies among immigration judges rapidly.
Flowing a mobile team of judges in behind ICE sweeps would go a long way toward encouraging self-deportation and providing immediate results to America.
On the whole, I think it is hard to criticize this idea in good faith. I understand that it foils the designs of those immigration judges who oppose Trump's policies and want to gum up the works, but that is a feature of having military judge advocate general officers serving as temporary immigration judges.
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