DOJ swore in active-duty military JAG officers as temporary immigration judges

On May 20, 2026, the Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review held an investiture ceremony in the DOJ Great Hall, swearing in 77 permanent immigration judges and 5 temporary immigration judges — what the department called the largest single class of new adjudicators in EOIR's history, bringing the corps to nearly 700. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche delivered remarks, and Chief Immigration Judge Teresa L. Riley administered the oath. The five temporary judges are active-duty military Judge Advocate General attorneys, the first cohort drawn under an August 2025 Pentagon memo, signed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, authorizing the detail of up to 600 military lawyers to serve as temporary immigration judges on assignments of up to 179 days.

Immigration judges are executive-branch adjudicators within the Justice Department rather than Article III judges, but they are expected to decide removal cases impartially and to afford respondents due process. Placing uniformed officers — who operate within a military chain of command and receive roughly two weeks of training for the role — into that civilian adjudicative function undermines the impartiality those proceedings require The New York City Bar Association condemned the arrangement as incompatible with the independence and due-process guarantees that immigration proceedings require, and the union representing immigration judges has warned that assigning inexperienced temporary judges risks slower decisions and a wave of appeals.

The temporary appointments are one piece of a broader reshaping of the immigration bench. Over the prior year EOIR removed more than 100 sitting immigration judges — about a quarter of the corps — and an NPR analysis found that judges with backgrounds representing immigrants were more likely to be fired than those who had worked for the Department of Homeland Security. Many of the permanent appointees in the May class come from immigration-enforcement backgrounds. The administration has stated that the hiring surge is meant to cut the immigration-court backlog and accelerate deportations, a goal that has also driven the scheduling of mass "mega master" calendar hearings.