President Donald Trump aims to double the number of immigration judges in the Justice Department to manage the unprecedented surge in deportations attributed to former President Joe Biden’s policies.
On Tuesday, reports from the Associated Press indicated that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has authorized the Department of Justice (DOJ) to recruit up to 600 military attorneys who will serve as federal immigration judges.
“The military is set to send a team of 150 lawyers, including both military personnel and civilians, to the DOJ. As noted in a memo from August 27, military branches are expected to identify this initial group by next week,” the AP stated.
Currently, there are around 600 immigration judges. The Trump administration had been criticized for a lenient approach to granting immigration benefits, such as asylum.
The Biden administration introduced a two-phase approach to protect millions of immigrants lacking valid asylum claims in the U.S. for an indefinite duration.
Specifically, officials under Biden overwhelmed immigration courts with 3.5 million historic lawsuits. In comparison, when Trump assumed office in late January 2017, the immigration court backlog stood at under 570,000 cases. By early 2021, that backlog ballooned to over 1 million, adding around 500,000 cases during Trump’s tenure.
Additionally, the Biden administration employed what some termed a “quiet pardon,” where cases of immigrants facing deportation were administratively closed.
According to Breitbart News, Joseph Edlow, director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), asserted that the Trump administration would greatly restrict administrative closures.
“Whatever the Biden administration could do to secure a stronger presence among the country’s undocumented population, they pursued,” Edlow shared with Breitbart News. “I believe their long-term goal was to offer some sort of public amnesty, make them all citizens, and then redistribute them to change demographics across the country.”
