The Pentagon is planning to divert up to 600 military lawyers (known as "JAGs" - members of the Judge Advocate General's corps) to serve as temporary immigration judges. The idea is to dispose of immigration cases faster. As Samantha Michaels explains in a helpful Mother Jones article, this is illegal, and is likely to lead to poor decisions in immigration cases, given that most JAG lawyers lack relevant expertise:
The Trump administration has decided to get more immigration judges from an unprecedented source: the military.
On Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that the Pentagon plans to send up to 600 military lawyers to the Justice Department to temporarily run immigration courts around the country. Some of them could receive their new assignments as early as next week.
The arrangement would help the Trump administration tackle a backlog of immigration cases. But military lawyers have little or no experience with immigration law. And some former military lawyers worry the plan isn't even legal. It "should raise all sorts of alarms," Daniel Maurer, a former Army attorney who also taught law at West Point, told me recently.
I spoke with Maurer in July, after President Trump first hinted that he'd be open to the idea of deploying military attorneys—known as Judge Advocate Generals, or JAGs—as immigration judges in Florida. That idea, floated by Gov. Ron DeSantis, hadn't yet come to fruition. "There is no clear precedent for what DeSantis and the president are doing," Mark Nevitt, a law professor at Emory University who served as a Navy JAG, told me at the time.
"This would be unlawful," added Rachel VanLandingham, a professor at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles who was an Air Force JAG.
In particular, VanLandingham said, turning military lawyers into immigration judges would likely violate the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal law that bars US troops from participating in civilian law enforcement or "executing the laws," unless otherwise authorized to do so by the Constitution or Congress. It's "frightening," VanLandingham said of the plan, because "the use of military courts to hear civilian cases is the essential component of martial law."
