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Military lawyers will serve as immigration judges as courts face massive backlog
Court Line News |
2025/09/12 10:23
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has approved sending up to 600 military lawyers to the Justice Department to serve as temporary immigration judges, according to a memo reviewed by The Associated Press.
The military will begin sending groups of 150 attorneys — both military and civilians — to the Justice Department “as soon as practicable,” and the military services should have the first round of people identified by next week, according to the Aug. 27 memo.
The effort comes as the Trump administration more regularly turns to the military as it cracks down on illegal immigration through ramped-up arrests and deportations. Its growing role in the push includes troops patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border, National Guard members being sent into U.S. cities to support immigration enforcement efforts, housing people awaiting deportation on military bases and using military aircraft to carry out deportations.
The administration’s focus on illegal immigration has added strain to the immigration courts, which were already dealing with a massive backlog of roughly 3.5 million cases that has ballooned in recent years. An organization for immigration lawyers called the new directive a “destructive” move meant to undermine the courts.
At the same time, more than 100 immigration judges have been fired or left voluntarily after taking deferred resignations offered by the Trump administration, their union says. In the most recent round of terminations, the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers said in July that at least 17 immigration judges had been fired “without cause” in courts across the country.
That has left about 600 immigration judges, union figures show, meaning the Pentagon move would double their ranks.
The Justice Department, which oversees the immigration courts, requested the assistance from the Defense Department, according to the memo sent by the Pentagon’s executive secretary to his DOJ counterpart. The military lawyers’ duties as immigration judges will initially last no more than 179 days but can be renewed, it said.
A DOJ spokesperson referred questions about the plan to the Defense Department, where officials directed questions to the White House.
A White House official said Tuesday that the administration is looking at a variety of options to help resolve the significant backlog of immigration cases, including hiring additional immigration judges. The official, who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, said the matter should be “a priority that everyone — including those waiting for adjudication — can rally around.”
The head of the American Immigration Lawyers Association decried bringing in temporary judges who lack expertise in immigration law, saying “it makes as much as sense as having a cardiologist do a hip replacement.”
“Expecting fair decisions from judges unfamiliar with the law is absurd. This reckless move guts due process and further undermines the integrity of our immigration court system,” said Ben Johnson, the organization’s executive director.
The memo stressed that the additional attorneys are contingent on availability and that mobilizing reserve officers may be necessary. Plus, the document said DOJ would be responsible for ensuring that anyone sent from the Pentagon does not violate the federal prohibition on using the military as domestic law enforcement, known as the Posse Comitatus Act.
The administration faced a setback on its efforts to use troops in unique ways to combat illegal immigration and crime, with a court ruling Tuesday that it “willfully” violated federal law by sending National Guard troops to Los Angeles in early June.
It is not immediately clear what impact shifting that number of military attorneys would have on the armed forces’ justice system. The attorneys, called judge advocates, have a range of duties much like civilian lawyers, from carrying out prosecutions, acting as a defense attorney or offering legal advice.
Pentagon officials did immediately offer details on where any of the 600 attorneys will be drawn from and whether they will come from active duty or the reserves.
Until she was abruptly fired in July, former supervising judge Jennifer Peyton administered the intensive training that all judges in Chicago undergo before working in some of the busiest immigration courts in the country. After the weekslong training, new judges are paired with an experienced mentor and have a two-year probationary period.
Peyton doubted that military attorneys would be able to master the complexities of immigration law without that rigorous process. She also said it wasn’t clear how they would handle the hundreds, or sometimes thousands, of cases on just a Chicago immigration judge’s docket each year.
“Six months is barely enough time to start to figure out the firehose of information and training,” she said.
Peyton also was concerned that Trump’s move didn’t supply more administrative workers, including translators, whom judges rely on to make decisions. The stakes, she said, were life or death for people who would come before the new judges.
“None of it makes sense unless you were intentionally trying to weaken the immigration courts,” Peyton said. |
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Anthropic to pay authors $1.5 billion to settle lawsuit over pirated books
Court Line News |
2025/09/08 06:41
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Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit by book authors who say the company took pirated copies of their works to train its chatbot.
The landmark settlement, if approved by a judge as soon as Monday, could mark a turning point in legal battles between AI companies and the writers, visual artists and other creative professionals who accuse them of copyright infringement.
The company has agreed to pay authors or publishers about $3,000 for each of an estimated 500,000 books covered by the settlement.
“As best as we can tell, it’s the largest copyright recovery ever,” said Justin Nelson, a lawyer for the authors. “It is the first of its kind in the AI era.”
A trio of authors — thriller novelist Andrea Bartz and nonfiction writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson — sued last year and now represent a broader group of writers and publishers whose books Anthropic downloaded to train its chatbot Claude.
A federal judge dealt the case a mixed ruling in June, finding that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books wasn’t illegal but that Anthropic wrongfully acquired millions of books through pirate websites.
If Anthropic had not settled, experts say losing the case after a scheduled December trial could have cost the San Francisco-based company even more money.
“We were looking at a strong possibility of multiple billions of dollars, enough to potentially cripple or even put Anthropic out of business,” said Thomas Long, a legal analyst for Wolters Kluwer.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco has scheduled a Monday hearing to review the settlement terms.
Anthropic said in a statement Friday that the settlement, if approved, “will resolve the plaintiffs’ remaining legacy claims.”
“We remain committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems,” said Aparna Sridhar, the company’s deputy general counsel.
As part of the settlement, the company has also agreed to destroy the original book files it downloaded.
Books are known to be important sources of data — in essence, billions of words carefully strung together — that are needed to build the AI large language models behind chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude and its chief rival, OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Alsup’s June ruling found that Anthropic had downloaded more than 7 million digitized books that it “knew had been pirated.” It started with nearly 200,000 from an online library called Books3, assembled by AI researchers outside of OpenAI to match the vast collections on which ChatGPT was trained.
Debut thriller novel “The Lost Night” by Bartz, a lead plaintiff in the case, was among those found in the dataset. Anthropic later took at least 5 million copies from the pirate website Library Genesis, or LibGen, and at least 2 million copies from the Pirate Library Mirror, Alsup wrote.
The Authors Guild told its thousands of members last month that it expected “damages will be minimally $750 per work and could be much higher” if Anthropic was found at trial to have willfully infringed their copyrights. The settlement’s higher award — approximately $3,000 per work — likely reflects a smaller pool of affected books, after taking out duplicates and those without copyright.
On Friday, Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, called the settlement “an excellent result for authors, publishers, and rightsholders generally, sending a strong message to the AI industry that there are serious consequences when they pirate authors’ works to train their AI, robbing those least able to afford it.”
The Danish Rights Alliance, which successfully fought to take down one of those shadow libraries, said Friday that the settlement would be of little help to European writers and publishers whose works aren’t registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.
“On the one hand, it’s comforting to see that compiling AI training datasets by downloading millions of books from known illegal file-sharing sites comes at a price,” said Thomas Heldrup, the group’s head of content protection and enforcement.
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Trump asks Supreme Court to quickly take up tariffs case and reverse ruling
Court Line News |
2025/09/02 09:56
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The Trump administration took the fight over tariffs to the Supreme Court on Wednesday, asking the justices to rule quickly that the president has the power to impose sweeping import taxes under federal law.
The government called on the court to reverse an appeals court ruling that found most of President Donald Trump’s tariffs are an illegal use of an emergency powers law.
It’s the latest in a series of Trump administration appeals to a Supreme Court he helped shape, and one that is expected to put a centerpiece of the president’s trade policy before the justices.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit left the tariffs in place for now, but the administration nevertheless called on the high court to intervene quickly in a petition filed electronically late Wednesday and provided to The Associated Press. It was expected to be formally docketed on Thursday.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the justices to take up the case and hear arguments in early November.
“That decision casts a pall of uncertainty upon ongoing foreign negotiations that the President has been pursuing through tariffs over the past five months, jeopardizing both already negotiated framework deals and ongoing negotiations,” he wrote. “The stakes in this case could not be higher.”
But the stakes are also high for small businesses battered by tariffs and uncertainty, said Jeffrey Schwab, senior counsel and director of litigation at the Liberty Justice Center.
“These unlawful tariffs are inflicting serious harm on small businesses and jeopardizing their survival. We hope for a prompt resolution of this case for our clients,” he said.
The businesses have twice prevailed, once at a federal court focused on trade and again with the appeals court’s 7-4 ruling.
Their lawsuit is one of several challenging the tariffs and erratic rollout that have shaken global markets, alienated U.S. trading partners and allies and raised fears of higher prices and slower economic growth.
But Trump has also used the levies to pressure the European Union, Japan and other countries into accepting new trade deals. Revenue from tariffs totaled $159 billion by late August, more than double what it was at the same point the year before.
Most judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, did not let Trump usurp congressional power to set tariffs. The dissenters, though, said the law does allow the president to regulate importation during emergencies without explicit limitations.
The ruling involves two sets of import taxes, both of which Trump justified by declaring a national emergency: the tariffs first announced in April and the ones from February on imports from Canada, China and Mexico.
The Constitution gives Congress the power to impose taxes, including tariffs. But over the decades, lawmakers have ceded authority to the president, and Trump has made the most of the power vacuum.
Some Trump tariffs, including levies on foreign steel, aluminum and autos, weren’t covered by the appeals court ruling. It also does not include tariffs Trump imposed on China in his first term that were kept by Democratic President Joe Biden.
Trump can impose tariffs under other laws, but those have more limitations on the speed and severity with which he could act.
The government has argued that if the tariffs are struck down, it might have to refund some of the import taxes that it’s collected, delivering a financial blow to the U.S. Treasury.
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Mexico’s first elected Supreme Court faces critical test of independence
Court Line News |
2025/08/27 10:01
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Mexico’s first elected Supreme Court will be seated Monday and observers will be watching closely to see whether it will assert its independence from the governing party that held the country’s first judicial elections.
Just three of its nine justices have any experience on the high court, the rest are new, including the court’s president Hugo Aguilar, a lawyer who spent his career defending Indigenous rights.
The idea of judicial elections came from Mexico’s former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who frequently clashed with judges who challenged his agenda. He said judges elected by the people would be more accountable and less corrupt. Critics said electing judges risked politicizing the judiciary.
The election was supposed to be nonpartisan, but there were instances of voting pamphlets being distributed that identified candidates linked to the governing party. Many voters were simply overwhelmed by the 7,700 candidates vying for more than 2,600 judicial positions.
The Supreme Court, however, will receive special attention. It had been a counterweight at times to the popular Lopez Obrador, whose Morena party also now holds majorities in both chambers of Congress.
It’s an issue that has brought broad international criticism to Mexico. Lopez Obrador expanded the crimes for which someone is automatically jailed pending trial, including for some nonviolent crimes. The policy appears to violate international treaties which Mexico has signed.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Office and the Inter-American Court on Human Rights are among the bodies that have called for Mexico to repeal the policy.
The Mexican government says that it is a necessary tool to take on criminal activity and to protect judges.
But in a country where cases can drag on for years without a trial reaching a conclusion and only one in five of those charged are convicted, critics say the policy violates their rights. Four of every 10 people in Mexican prisons had not been convicted in 2023, according to the Federal and State Penitentiary Systems census.
The previous court declined to take it up in its final days.
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Texas GOP Set to Trigger National Redistricting Battle With Map Vote
Court Line News |
2025/08/18 07:44
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The first domino in a growing national redistricting battle is likely to fall Wednesday as the Republican-controlled Texas legislature is expected to pass a new congressional map creating five new winnable seats for the GOP.
The vote follows prodding by President Donald Trump, eager to stave off a midterm defeat that would deprive his party of control of the House of Representatives, and weeks of delays after dozens of Texas Democratic state lawmakers fled the state in protest. Some Democrats returned Monday, only to be assigned round-the-clock police escorts to ensure their attendance at Wednesday’s session. Those who refused to be monitored were confined to the House floor, where they protested on a livestream Tuesday night.
Furious national Democrats have vowed payback for the Texas map, with California’s legislature poised to approve new maps adding more Democratic-friendly seats later this week. The map would still need to be approved by that state’s voters in November.
Normally, states redraw maps once a decade with new census figures. But Trump is lobbying other conservative-controlled states like Indiana and Missouri to also try to squeeze new GOP-friendly seats out of their maps as his party prepares for a difficult midterm election next year.
In Texas, Democrats spent the day before the vote continuing to draw attention to the extraordinary lengths the Republicans who run the legislature were going to ensure it takes place. Democratic state Rep. Nicole Collier started it when she refused to sign what Democrats called the “permission slip” needed to leave the House chamber, a half-page form allowing Department of Public Safety troopers to follow them. She spent Monday night and Tuesday on the House floor, where she set up a livestream while her Democratic colleagues outside had plainclothes officers following them to their offices and homes.
Dallas-area Rep. Linda Garcia said she drove three hours home from Austin with an officer following her. When she went grocery shopping, he went down every aisle with her, pretending to shop, she said. As she spoke to The Associated Press by phone, two unmarked cars with officers inside were parked outside her home.
“It’s a weird feeling,” she said. “The only way to explain the entire process is: It’s like I’m in a movie.”
The trooper assignments, ordered by Republican House Speaker Dustin Burrows, was another escalation of a redistricting battle that has widened across the country. Trump is pushing GOP state officials to tilt the map for the 2026 midterms more in his favor to preserve the GOP’s slim House majority, and Democrats nationally have rallied around efforts to retaliate.
House Minority Leader Gene Wu, from Houston, and state Rep. Vince Perez, of El Paso, stayed overnight with Collier, who represents a minority-majority district in Fort Worth.
On Tuesday, more Democrats returned to the Capitol to tear up the slips they had signed and stay on the House floor, which has a lounge and restrooms for members.
Dallas-area Rep. Cassandra Garcia Hernandez called their protest a “slumber party for democracy,” and she said Democrats were holding strategy sessions on the floor.
“We are not criminals,” Houston Rep. Penny Morales Shaw said.
Collier said having officers shadow her was an attack on her dignity and an attempt to control her movements.
Burrows brushed off Collier’s protest, saying he was focused on important issues, such as providing property tax relief and responding to last month’s deadly floods. His statement Tuesday morning did not mention redistricting, and his office did not immediately respond to other Democrats joining Collier.
“Rep. Collier’s choice to stay and not sign the permission slip is well within her rights under the House Rules,” Burrows said.
Under those rules, until Wednesday’s scheduled vote, the chamber’s doors are locked, and no member can leave “without the written permission of the speaker.”
To do business Wednesday, 100 of 150 House members must be present. The GOP plan is designed to send five additional Republicans from Texas to the U.S. House. Texas Democrats returned to Austin after Democrats in California launched an effort to redraw their state’s districts to take five seats from Republicans.
Democrats also said they were returning because they expect to challenge the new maps in court. |
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Colorado deputies disciplined for helping federal immigration agents
Court Line News |
2025/08/01 13:10
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Two Colorado deputies have been disciplined for violating state law by helping federal agents make immigration arrests, and their sheriff says officers from other agencies have done the same.
One of the deputies, Alexander Zwinck, was sued by Colorado’s attorney general last week, after his cooperation with federal immigration agents on a drug task force was revealed following the June arrest of a college student from Brazil with an expired visa.
Following an internal investigation, a second Mesa County Sheriff’s Office deputy and task force member, Erik Olson, was also found to have shared information. The two deputies used a Signal chat to relay information to federal agents, according to documents released Wednesday by the sheriff’s office.
Zwinck was placed on three weeks of unpaid leave, and Olson was given two weeks of unpaid leave, Mesa County Sheriff Todd Rowell said in a statement. Both were removed from the task force.
Two supervisors also were disciplined. One was suspended without pay for two days, and another received a letter of reprimand. A third supervisor received counseling.
State laws push back against Trump crackdown
The lawsuit and disciplinary actions come as lawmakers in Colorado and other Democratic-led states have crafted legislation intended to push back against President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Since Trump took office, pro-immigrant bills have advanced through legislatures in Illinois, Vermont, California, Connecticut and other states. The measures include stronger protections for immigrants in housing, employment and police encounters.
Trump has enlisted hundreds of state and local law enforcement agencies to help identify immigrants in the U.S. illegally and detain them for potential deportation. The Republican also relaxed longtime rules restricting immigration enforcement near schools, churches and hospitals.
Zwinck was sued under a new state law signed by Gov. Jared Polis about two weeks before the arrest of the student from Brazil. It bars local government employees including law enforcement from sharing identifying information about people with federal immigration officials. Previously, only state agencies were barred from doing that. It’s one of a series of laws limiting the state’s involvement in immigration enforcement passed over the years that has drawn criticism and a lawsuit from the federal government.
The U.S. Department of Justice has also sued Illinois and New York, as well as several cities in those states and New Jersey, alleging their policies violate the U.S. Constitution or federal immigration laws.
Officers say they were following established procedures
Zwinck and Olson told officials they thought they were operating according to long-standing procedures.
However, the internal investigation found they had both received and read two emails prior to the passage of the new law about previous limits on cooperation with immigration officials. The most recent was sent on Jan. 30, 2025, after an official for Homeland Security Investigations, part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, had asked state and local law enforcement officers at a law enforcement meeting to contact HSI or ICE if they arrested a person for a violent crime who was believed not to be a citizen, the investigation documents said. The email said not to contact HSI or ICE.
Zwinck said he didn’t know about the new law and was not interested in immigration enforcement.
“When I was out there, I wanted to find drugs, guns and bad guys,” Zwinck said at a July 23 disciplinary hearing. “And sending that information to HSI they provided the ability to give me real time background information on the person I was in contact with,” he said.
Olson, who said he had been with the sheriff’s office 18 years, testified at his disciplinary hearing that it was “standard practice” to send information up to federal agents during traffic stops.
“It was routine for ICE to show up on the back end of a traffic stop to do their thing,” Olson said. “I truly thought what we were doing was condoned by our supervision and lawful.”
A lawyer at a law firm listed as representing both deputies, Michael Lowe, did not immediately return a telephone call or email seeking comment.
Rowell said drug task force members from other law enforcement agencies, including the Colorado State Patrol, also shared information with immigration agents on the Signal chat. The state patrol denied the claim.
The sheriff faulted Attorney General Phil Weiser for filing the lawsuit against Zwinck before a local internal investigation was complete. He called on the Democrat, who is running for governor, to drop it.
“As it stands, the lawsuit filed by the Attorney General’s Office sends a demoralizing message to law enforcement officers across Colorado — that the law may be wielded selectively and publicly for maximum political effect rather than applied fairly and consistently,” he said.
Weiser said last week that he was investigating whether other officers in the chat violated the law.
Spokesperson Lawrence Pacheco said Weiser was presented with evidence of a “blatant violation of state law” and had to act.
“The attorney general has a duty to enforce state laws and protect Coloradans and he’ll continue to do so,” Pacheco said.
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