Pentagon authorized up to 600 military JAG lawyers to serve as temporary immigration judges

On August 27, 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memo authorizing the Department of Defense to detail up to 600 Judge Advocate General Corps lawyers to the Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review to serve as temporary immigration judges on assignments of up to 179 days each. The memo, obtained by press outlets, specified that the first round of approximately 150 attorneys should be identified within a week. The authorization was made at the request of the Justice Department and followed DOJ's decision the preceding week to lower qualifications for temporary immigration judges by removing the requirement of prior immigration experience.

Military JAGs operate within a chain of command and report to superior officers — a structural condition incompatible with the independent adjudicative role immigration courts require. The immigration judges' union warned that appointing inexperienced temporary judges would produce slower decisions and a surge of appeals that could deepen the existing case backlog. The New York City Bar Association later condemned the arrangement as incompatible with the due-process guarantees immigration proceedings require, and characterized the military chain of command as fundamentally at odds with the independence the immigration bench demands.

The Hegseth memo provided the legal predicate for a program that became visible on May 20, 2026, when the DOJ swore in five active-duty JAG attorneys as the first cohort of temporary immigration judges — part of the largest investiture class in EOIR's history. The program operated alongside a broader reshaping of the immigration bench in which EOIR removed more than 100 sitting judges and replaced them with enforcement-aligned appointees, explicitly aimed at accelerating deportation case processing. The Standing records this authorization as an instance of directing military personnel into civilian judicial functions, subordinating the independence of the immigration bench to the administrative and operational priorities of the military chain of command.