Military Lawyers as Immigration Judges?

On August 28, the Department of Justice changed the requirements to serve as a temporary immigration judge. Previously, to be a temporary judge, a candidate must have served (1) as a former immigration judge or appellate immigration judge, (2) as an administrative judge within another executive branch agency, or (3) as a DOJ attorney with at least 10 years of immigration law experience.

The Trump administration has now removed those requirements. Now, any attorney can be selected to serve as a temporary immigration judge, including military attorneys and attorneys from the private sector with no immigration experience.

In the case of the right doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, the Trump Administration asserts that we need more immigration judges to deal with the enormous backlog of immigration court cases. But since Trump’s inauguration, over 100 judges have been fired.

Inexperienced and incompetent judges administering immigration court cases is only going to cause chaos.