The Trump administration’s first year focused on identifying who to arrest, making those arrests, and obtaining funding to expand detention capacity. Arthur anticipates the addition of dozens, even hundreds of judges, will “absolutely” speed up the process in 2026, setting up more people — both in custody and who do not show up to their court dates — to be deported and ultimately removed from the country.

“The more people that you get into court, the more final orders you’re going to get just based on people who don’t show up,” said Arthur, resident fellow in law and policy for the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that advocates lower levels of immigration. “And then, of course, you’ll have more merits decisions.”

For years, the Department of Justice’s Executive Office of Immigration Review, where the immigration court is housed, has played an impossible numbers game as its hundreds of immigration judges tried to wade through millions of court cases involving noncitizens.

The number of cases before the court has surged since the first term of the Obama administration. In fiscal 2012, 325,000 cases were on the docket. The number of pending cases remained under 1 million until 2019, the middle of Trump’s first term. Total cases rose over the next few years but peaked at 3.5 million in 2024.

That figure has begun to come down in Trump’s first year in office, finishing calendar year 2024 with 3.3 million cases, including 2.3 million from people seeking asylum, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which analyzes government data.

Asylum is a protection that people arriving at the U.S. border may apply for to avoid being forced to return home. Asylum-seekers must demonstrate that they have suffered or fear they will be persecuted due to race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, if deported.

As of last March, more than 3-in-4 asylum claims were being denied by judges, the highest level in two decades.

Austin Kocher, an independent immigration data researcher formerly associated with TRAC, explained at the time that the first step for Trump in overhauling the immigration courts and deciding cases would be speeding up those decisions and ensuring more denials from judges.

“Between explicit policy changes and implicit threats to get in line or get fired, judges on the whole seem to be following orders to deny, deny, deny,” Kocher wrote in a post. “The Trump administration, which resumed in January 2025, appears to be fast-tracking asylum decisions with the clear goal of clearing the docket by simply denying as many people as possible, as quickly as possible.”

In that time, 55 judges have been fired and 80 others opted to retire, according to an Axios report.

That has left the Trump administration with the challenge of adding more judges, but rather than go through the lengthy hiring process, the administration found another way to grow that bench. The administration moved in 2025 to shift War Department attorneys in the Judge Advocate General Corps to EOIR to quickly learn immigration law and begin deciding the fates of the millions of people with cases on the docket.

The Trump administration published a rule last August that approved up to 600 JAG lawyers being sent over to EOIR to work as immigration judges.

Former immigration judge, retired Marine Corps Col. Daren Margolin, was tapped to oversee the immigration courts.

To date, Margolin told Axios, the EOIR has received 1,700 applications from the general public in response to its public relations campaign to recruit “deportation judges,” a messaging twist that departs from the term “immigration judges.” Margolin has hired 50 JAG lawyers on a temporary basis, but plans to hire more.

The JAG lawyers will receive 6 to 8 weeks of immigration law training, which Arthur said went beyond the three total weeks of training he had received for the job years ago.

Margolin hopes to limit immigrants’ ability to appeal unfavorable decisions, which would lead to faster deportations for those ordered to be removed.

On Wednesday, Charles Kuck, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association who has represented more than 700 asylum-seekers, pointed out two issues with bringing in JAG attorneys, as well as hiring people who understand that their job will be to serve as “deportation judges.”

First, Kuck wrote in a text message, using the military as judges violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the military from conducting civilian law enforcement. Second, Kuck insisted that the judge applicants “are not neutral,” adding that the existing judges who were neutral had already been fired.

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Arthur said it would be wise to have the newly hired JAG lawyers focus on “master calendar” hearings, where a judge explains rights and responsibilities to the defendant, and leave it to more senior judges to handle merits cases, where claims are heard and decided.

“You can have 20, 30 master calendars [sic] per day, and so actually getting those cases on track, getting them ready for a merits hearing for an asylum application or just an application, or something like that, that would be a huge help, because that would actually free up the other, more experienced judges to actually resolve the merits cases,” Arthur said.