President Donald Trump is looking to double the Justice Department’s immigration judges to help swiftly adjudicate an unprecedented number of deportation cases that were left by former President Joe Biden.
On Tuesday, the Associated Press (AP) reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has approved providing the Department of Justice (DOJ) with as many as 600 military lawyers to serve as federal immigration judges.
“The military will begin sending groups of 150 attorneys — both military and civilians — to the Justice Department “as soon as practicable,” and the military services should have the first round of people identified by next week, according to the Aug. 27 memo,” the AP reports.
Currently, there are about 600 immigration judges as the Trump administration fires judges that it has found to be too lax in giving out immigration benefits like asylum.
The Biden administration had carried out a two-step scheme to keep millions of migrants, most of whom do not have valid asylum claims, in the U.S. indefinitely.
In particular, Biden officials packed the government’s immigration court with a historic 3.5 million cases. For perspective, when former President Donald Trump took office in late January 2017, the immigration court backlog stood at fewer than 570,000 cases. When Trump left office in early 2021, the backlog had grown by about 500,000 cases to reach more than a million.
At the same time, Biden officials carried out a so-called “quiet amnesty” where migrants facing deportation had their cases administratively closed — keeping them in the U.S.
As Breitbart News reported, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Joseph Edlow is ensuring that the Trump administration hugely limits administrative closures.
“Anything the Biden administration could do to get a bigger foothold from an illegal population in this country, they were going to do,” Edlow told Breitbart News. “I mean, their long-term plan, I think we have to assume, was to grant some sort of mass amnesty, make them all citizens, and then spread them out to try to change demographics elsewhere throughout the country.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter here.
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