The Trump administration will temporarily assign military lawyers to act as judges in immigration cases.

A statement released by the Pentagon spokesperson says at the request of the Department of Justice,

the Department of Defense is identifying qualified judge advocates and civilian attorneys for details to serve as temporary immigration judges.

These DOD attorneys will augment

existing resources to help further combat a backlog of cases by presiding over immigration hearings.

There are a number of questions about the implications of this novel move, and for that we turn to

James McPherson. He was the Undersecretary of the Army during the

first Trump administration and also had a 25-year career in the Navy where he served as that

service's top lawyer in uniform. Thank you for being with us. And before we get to the implications,

I have to ask, in your view, is this legal, the expansion of the U.S. military into a civilian

judicial process? Well, there's certainly a lot of the U.S. military into a civilian judicial process?

Well, there's certainly a lot of legal issues that is raised by this decision, not the least of

which is whether or not it's appropriate to appoint a commissioned officer in the military to these

positions, whether or not it violates the Posse Comitatis Act. There are some old

office illegal counsel opinions out of the Department of Justice that indicate it is legal, but in a

very narrow sense. And whether that narrow sense is met by appointing them as temporary immigration

judges is yet to be seen. Well, how do the courtroom and administrative law skills

that JAG lawyers develop in the military? How does that translate into serving as temporary

immigration judges when immigration law is so specialized in complex? As you said, it is very

specialized and complex. What's very interesting is Thursday of last week, the Department of Justice changed the rules

with regard who's qualified to be a temporary immigration judge.

Prior to Thursday of last week, it required that they be a retired immigration judge

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