The Trump administration has begun recruiting hundreds of military lawyers as immigration judges, presided over the lifelong decision of U.S. immigration on immigration as experts warn that the White House strategically high risk and can be said to be illegal.
Judges are temporary, but renewable, and the administration’s goal is to meet the urgent need for more immigration judges in Donald Trump’s mass deportation mission – even if experienced immigration judges seem to be considered a violation of the president’s agenda, that is happening.
Active-duty armed forces officials and reserve personnel (part of the military judiciary, known as the Judge’s Defense Attorney (JAG), have drawn the attorney’s nickname “JAGS” and they have received messages asking them to volunteer for senior immigration positions.
But experts warn that military lawyers do not have the specialized knowledge to perform the duties of immigration judges and may have received only one or two hours of immigration law training – if that was during the JAG school, and their appointments could be a violation of the law.
“The military’s mission is to kill people and break into things – Jag training to support this mission within the scope of military law. This is different from immigration law. So why do we use those lawyers, the lawyers of all attorneys, to decide the fate of families seeking asylum?” said Shawn Vandiver, a Navy veteran and immigration advocate. “It’s just another way the Trump administration is trying to sow fear and stop people from coming here.”
According to the White House and the Pentagon, military lawyers can double the ranks of immigration judges and resolve an overwhelming backlog of 3.75 million cases. But their use of civilian immigration enforcement appears to violate Congress’ laws, the Posse Comitatus Act and the executive’s own regulations, experts say.
In fact, in the re-layed Reagan-era memorandum, even Samuel Alito (now one of the most conservative judges of the U.S. Supreme Court), he recognized that “if in the usual military litigation, a military lawyer operates under a part-time military chain to perform civil law enforcement functions and to execute their official lawyer for formal military officials”, then “
He strongly advises not to appear in a personal case in court.
Similarly, Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee said they were “extremely uneasy” about the program and its ability to do practical work if they were transferred to the immigration court.
“I don’t know much about what their final game is,” immigration attorney and retired lieutenant Margaret Stock retired in the U.S. Army Reserve. “Unless they just want to send a message that their militarized justice in the United States, that scares people in some way.”
The guardian sought comment from the Pentagon but was forwarded to the Department of Justice (DOJ), which did not respond to a similar request.
The expected military mission is after the ease of rules by the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) last month to enable any attorney to serve as interim immigration judges. Officials said they no longer believe limiting appointees to “one with the threshold level of experience in immigration law can be in Eoir’s interest.”
Vandiver was shocked.
“You once had to prove that you kind of made you a temporary immigration judge. They have now removed all of these requirements and literally, Donald Trump decided, ‘eh, maybe that person can decide someone’s fate forever,” Vandiver said.
Experts say service members who receive temporary immigration judges are expected to receive some immigration laws training, but are not sufficient to fill positions responsibly.
Immigration and asylum seekers appear in immigration courts for many reasons, including suspending litigation in litigation in pursuit of other immigration relief in order to protect their own cases. But in general, people are in front of judges because they are relocating to the homeland or will occupy their third country.
Since Trump’s First Administration, a staggering backlog of cases awaiting rulings amid widespread repression by foreign governments, natural disasters, failed economies and other factors in other countries around the world, forcing people to flee international borders for security and opportunity.
The Biden administration often declared the “break of” the immigration system in the United States and tried to relieve pressure on the court system early on, but these measures were largely abandoned later in his tenure. Nevertheless, advocates and some Democrats often lament that the U.S. Congress failed to pass legislation that allowed long-term, law-abiding immigrants to legalize their immigration status more quickly than to get stuck in a court backlog as cases get old.
Meanwhile, immigration judges who have been trained and actively presided over the dock have been forced to withdraw from the bench in recent months, many seemingly because their judicial philosophy does not match the government’s priorities.
In New York, two judges have been fired recently, one of whom is the city’s highest speed of asylum granting, while the other is an outspoken critic (ICE) of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). San Francisco has fired seven judges, including top immigration judges and three rulings with the highest rate of asylum grants. Across the country, similar strikes, including in the Chicago and Boston areas, suggested focusing on burning courts in democracies and sanctuary cities.
More than a hundred immigration judges have left or been fired since Trump returned to the White House.
“Even on Friday [September 5]they are firing qualified immigration judges sitting on the bench and now they claim they need these jags to come in and take their place, which makes no sense. You know, they won’t pay attention to the law. So they try to bring them in some way in an attempt to speed up deportation. ”
Up to 600 military lawyers will be appointed as 179-day interim immigration judges after the news broke, renewable missions, Corey Lewandowski, a longtime Trump party and senior adviser to Kristi Noem, a secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, wrote on social media:
As commander-in-chief, Trump maintains a huge impact with the military, and observers believe that making jags that violate the government’s massive expulsion campaign could pose a risk of harming their profession – interim immigration judges and later. But Vandiver heard from service members that the topic of immigration courts and other latest uses of the military in immigration enforcement “they don’t want to do that, they know it’s wrong”.
“They know that it doesn’t match our American values. They know that these tasks are just the result of American dictators’ fever dreams,” he said.
Experts say that for these and other reasons, members of JAG Corps who take the office seriously may not be prone to forced deportation, even if they are in an impossible situation.
“People can be sent back to their home countries and face torture, persecution, death, imprisonment,” said Jeff Joseph, president of the American Immigration Lawyer Association. “I would be very uncomfortable and need to go through two weeks of training and make these decisions.”
Given the possibility of a large-scale appeal challenged their potential errors, jurisdiction and authority, service members are not necessarily going to have a heavy impact on the overall backlog of immigration cases.
“If the judge is not trained, all these cases will resort to legal errors and other issues,” Joseph said. “So you’re just transferring one backlog to another.”
Finally, he said, the question was: “Are we really arming the immigration courts?”
