The Trump administration is considering a plan to send about 600 military lawyers to work temporarily as immigration judges, as the White House pushes to increase the rate of deportations, according to more than half a dozen current and former officials.
Moving the lawyers to the Justice Department would bolster the capacity of the immigration system to process a backlog, and insert the military into yet another aspect of domestic life.
As of July, there were nearly 3.8 million pending immigration cases, according to the Justice Department. The plan would also put military officers who have little or no experience with immigration law into roles adjudicating the fates of migrants.
No final decision has been made, and many details remain unclear, according to the current and former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive subject. But, they said, the plan has been under development for several weeks, and its basic outlines have started to circulate among the services.
President Trump has increasingly turned to the military to advance his domestic policy priorities. He has deployed troops to the streets of Los Angeles to protect immigration agents from protesters, and to the nation’s capital as part of a broader surge of federal agents assigned to crack down on crime.
Pentagon and Justice Department spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment. But the White House said in a statement that the administration was “looking at a variety of options to help resolve the significant backlog of immigration cases, including hiring additional immigration judges.”
The statement added: “This should be a priority that everyone — including those waiting for adjudication — can rally around.”
Rear Adm. Donald J. Guter, a retired Navy Judge Advocate General and former president and dean of South Texas College of Law, said that he and other retired military colleagues were aware of the proposal. He criticized it as overreach and raised the possibility of retribution against judge advocates general whose decisions do not align with the administration’s desired outcomes.
“If true, it would be another unprecedented action, and unwise,” Admiral Guter wrote in an email. “It’s another authoritarian step toward militarizing civilian functions, compromises the statutory role of JAGs, reduces readiness and is a specialized area in which the JAGs have no training or experience.”
Unlike courts in the judicial branch, where the Senate confirms judges to life tenure to ensure their independence, immigration courts are part of the executive branch. They are run by the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. Still, while immigration judges are department employees, they are supposed to act as neutral arbiters.
Notably, on Thursday, the Justice Department published a rule change on the website of the Federal Register relaxing criteria for who can serve as a temporary immigration judge. It eliminated a requirement that such judges have substantial experience in immigration law, or that they must already be serving as administrative law judges at other agencies.
The department may designate “any lawyer” as a temporary immigration judge for six months — a period that can be renewed indefinitely. The administration’s description of the change promoted the increased “flexibility” while rejecting critics who raised doubts about whether it would increase the risk of biased judges.
The planning for temporarily bolstering the ranks of immigration judges with military lawyers appears to be centered in the office of the Pentagon general counsel, Earl G. Matthews, whom the Senate confirmed at the end of July, the people briefed on the matter said.
The idea is to pull military lawyers from the Judge Advocate General, or JAG, corps of every service, sourced from active-duty, reserves and the National Guard, and roughly in proportion to the size of the available members of each branch, the people said. That means the largest service, the U.S. Army, would contribute the most military lawyers.
But many details remain unclear. They include how much training in immigration law the judge advocates general would receive; how long the assignments would last; whom the lawyers would report to; whether they would be sent to immigration centers or would handle hearings through video teleconferencing; which budget would pay for the effort; and what would happen to the work they are doing now.
Shortly after taking office, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired the top JAG officers of the Army and Air Force. The position at the Navy was already vacant. Mr. Hegseth has long made clear his hostility toward military lawyers.
He insulted them as “jagoffs”in his memoir, which was published last year, and blamed them for what he saw as unduly restrictive rules of engagement on the battlefield. He also questioned whether it made sense to obey the Geneva Conventions, a core ethos of JAG lawyers.
The retired Maj. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap Jr. of the Air Force, who was a deputy Judge Advocate General, expressed concern about the disconnect between military lawyer training and immigration law.
“While JAGs do have experience in various administrative hearings, I doubt many have ever even seen an immigration court session,” he said. “JAGs are not routinely trained in immigration law, and I believe it would take significant training for them to become competent immigration judges.”
Lee Gelernt, an immigrant-rights specialist for the American Civil Liberties Union, said that there was a connection between the proposal and other ways the Trump administration has treated immigration as a military matter. Mr. Gelernt has helped lead lawsuits challenging the holding of migrants at the military’s prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the administration’s use of a wartime deportation law to send migrants to a Salvadoran prison without due process.
“Aside from whether these individuals are properly trained and are being selected only to rubber-stamp desired outcomes, this is another example of the Trump administration dangerously conflating immigration and the military,” Mr. Gelernt said.
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.
John Ismay is a reporter covering the Pentagon for The Times. He served as an explosive ordnance disposal officer in the U.S. Navy.
Helene Cooper is a Pentagon correspondent for The Times. She was previously an editor, diplomatic correspondent and White House correspondent.
Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.
Greg Jaffe covers the Pentagon and the U.S. military.
The post Trump Administration Weighs Having Military Lawyers Work as Immigration Judges appeared first on New York Times.
