Trump Pushes Bounds of Military, Police Immigration Actions (1)

President Donald Trump is wielding the US military and ballooning federal police forces in unprecedented ways to carry out his aggressive deportation campaign.

The administration’s latest moves this week include the assignment of military lawyers from the Judge Advocate General’s Corps to work temporarily as immigration judges—tasked with weighing asylum claims and deportation orders; and adding armed law enforcement officers to US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which processes green cards, work permits, and other benefits.

“Under President Trump and Stephen Miller, every executive branch agency is now also an immigration enforcement agency, including the Department of Defense,” Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of the immigrants’ rights group America’s Voice, said, referring to the White House deputy chief of staff.

The Department of Homeland Security is doing a hiring spree to meet lofty immigration arrest and removal targets, and Trump has tapped the Pentagon to play an outsized role in securing the border, policing immigrant communities, and even weighing asylum claims.

Trump has morphed immigration enforcement into a supercharged and sometimes militarized operation affecting cities and communities across the country, with an all-agencies-on-deck mobilization of federal resources to crack down on illegal immigration.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth say the push is necessary to root out threats in the US after record border crossings under President Joe Biden. Critics contend the approach menaces immigrants in the US, lacks guardrails for due process and civil rights, and abuses military authority.

Military Role

Trump started using the military to support immigration enforcement shortly after taking office, with a Jan. 22 executive order declaring a national emergency at the border and calling on the Defense Department to help DHS manage it.

The Pentagon’s role has expanded since then, with military bases used to house detained immigrants, National Guard and other military personnel supporting ICE operations, and the creation of military zones along the US-Mexico border. But the military’s involvement in domestic affairs is delicate: The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 bars federal troops from participating in civilian law enforcement except when expressly authorized by statute.

Read more: Why Trump’s Use of Military in US Is So Controversial

Sen. Jack Reed (R.I.), the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, argued that the use of JAGs in immigration courts likely violates the law “because being a judge puts you directly into an enforcement role.”

Several cornerstones of the Trump immigration agenda have been challenge in courts across the country, including birthright citizenship, travel bans, and cancellation of humanitarian migrant programs.

The full scope of the JAGs’ work in immigration courts remains to be seen. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said they would “augment existing resources to help further combat a backlog of cases by presiding over immigration hearings.”

Having JAGs work as magistrate judges would expedite cases without straying into law enforcement, said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), a senior member of the Armed Services Committee.

“They’ve got to be careful how they do it, but they are within the law the way that they are doing it at the present time,” he said, “as long as they don’t directly get involved in the law enforcement.”

Syracuse University law professor William Banks, who in June decried a “mounting crisis of militarizing immigration enforcement,” said he views the use of JAGs in immigration court as generally nonthreatening. But, he warned, “there is a slippery slope” and a “corrosion” of the intentional delineation between military and civilian work—made more evident by the deployment of National Guard personnel this summer to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

JAGs’ work in immigration courts raises a more immediate practical concern, said American Immigration Lawyers Association President Jeff Joseph.

“It’s not that they’re unskilled or unqualified to be immigration judges; the issue is they’re not trained,” he said. “Immigration law has been compared to the tax code in terms of complexity.”

New York University law ethics professor Stephen Gillers noted that understaffing on the immigration bench would likely make the timeframe for JAGs’ work in immigration courts more uncertain.

“It seems ‘temporary’ is going to be quite an elastic term until the administration does a serious effort to gather new judges for the bench,” Gillers said.

Federal Police

As Trump taps the military, his administration is also building out the federal law enforcement agencies that typically handle immigration work, seeking to recruit 10,000 new ICE officers and 8,000 Customs and Border Protection agents and officers with funding Republicans in Congress approved this summer.

Even US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that administers benefits and processes applications, is launching a armed police force to investigate civil and criminal immigration violations.

Read more: US Immigration Agency to Create New Armed Police Force

Hiring for the law enforcement roles is time-consuming, even with recruitment incentives and fast-tracked training. In the meantime, DHS and the Justice Department continue to rely on other agencies to support their immigration enforcement efforts. The State Department, Internal Revenue Service, and the FBI are among those helping ICE.

Carrie Cordero, a senior fellow and general counsel at the Center for a New American Security, said she sees long-term consequences to the administration’s approach. The JAGs heading to immigration courts, for example, are sorely needed to provide military advice, and FBI agents need to focus on non-immigration investigations, including cybersecurity cases, she said.

“Something else is getting missed, something else is not getting done, and as a country we will see the results of that in the future,” she said.