Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is replacing immigration judges with hundreds of military lawyers, following the Trump administration’s months-long purge of immigration courts.
Hegseth approved more than 600 military lawyers from the Department of Defense to serve as temporary immigration judges, nearly doubling the ranks of jurists overseeing the president’s massive deportation efforts, the Associated Press reported Tuesday. It’s a move that indicates the Trump administration was simply clearing house to install their own ranks of loyalist judges, intent on seeing the president’s deportations through.
A memo dated August 27 said that the military would begin dispatching batches of 150 attorneys to the Justice Department “as soon as practicable,” and have an initial group identified by next week. Appointments would last no longer than 179 days, expiring in February, but can be renewed.
Since President Donald Trump entered office, a series of departures and firings have left only roughly 600 immigration judges to oversee the nation’s 71 immigration courts, and handle a backlog of 3.7 million cases—and the number increases every day.
Most recently in July, the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers claimed that another 17 immigration judges had been fired “without cause.” In February, Kerry Doyle, a longtime immigration attorney, who was part of an upcoming class of immigration judges who were all dismissed, alleged that her dismissal was politically motivated.
As a result of the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, the number of people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement has reached an all-time high. At the end of August a record number of 61,226 people were detained by ICE, and 70 percent of them did not have criminal convictions.
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