CHELMSFORD — As the Trump administration has pushed forward with its aggressive immigration enforcement strategies over the last year and a half, one of its targets has been the immigration courts that process immigration cases.
Among the affected courts was the Chelmsford Immigration Court, where a number of judges have been fired during the second Trump administration. At the same time the Pentagon moved last year to approve the use of military lawyers from the Judge Advocate General Corps as temporary immigration judges.
According to hiring bulletins from the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, at least three JAG attorneys have been appointed as temporary judges in the Chelmsford court since October, two of which were appointed just last month.
Jason David Thomas, a member of the Massachusetts Bar Association, was appointed to the Chelmsford Immigration Court in October while holding the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve. Terry Meinecke, also a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve and member of the North Carolina Bar, and Kai Bernal-LeClaire, a commander in the U.S. Navy Reserve and member of the Texas bar, were both appointed to the Chelmsford court last month.
The appointment of military lawyers as immigration judges was started last year amid a preexisting backlog of approximately 3.5 million cases in immigration courts, which only grew alongside the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
In response to the appointments, the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts filed a lawsuit against the Department of Defense in Massachusetts District Court on July 29 to compel the department to produce public records about the temporary JAG attorneys being used as judges. In a statement to The Sun Wednesday, Dan McFadden, the lead ACLUM attorney for that case, said a founding principle of this country “is that the military does not sit in judgment over civilians arrested in the United States.”
“That principle is deeply rooted in our law. Yet the Trump administration appears to have deployed active-duty military officers to determine who is a citizen, who will be free, who will be jailed, and who will be expelled from our country,” said McFadden. “The exercise of such power by the military raises serious legal and constitutional questions. And the Department of Defense has failed to produce even the most basic information about this program. We are going to court to uphold the public’s right to full transparency, including information about how the program is structured, what orders the military officers assigned to hear immigration cases have received, and whether they are sufficiently independent and impartial to serve in these roles.”
The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Sun Wednesday.
Among the approximately 120 immigration judges who were fired by the Trump administration was George Pappas, who had been tapped as one of the Chelmsford Immigration Court’s first judges in 2024 when the court opened to help address the backlog. Pappas has been a vocal critic of the Trump administration’s strategies toward immigration and the courts since his firing in July 2025.
In a phone call with The Sun Wednesday, Pappas, who has since returned to private practice with offices in Massachusetts and North Carolina, said the appointment of JAG lawyers to a judge’s bench creates “an inherent competency issue.”
“First of all, these [JAG] judges don’t need to have any immigration law experience, and that is a huge problem. It is like asking a general practitioner to go do brain surgery,” said Pappas.
Another issue is what he said is a lack of proper training of the military judges in an area of law he said has a “hugely steep” learning curve.
“It is legal malpractice, and shame on the EOIR and this administration for putting these judges in this position,” said Pappas.
One of the most pressing conflicts created by using military lawyers as judges, Pappas said, is that of oaths. Enlisted members of the U.S. military must take an oath which includes a commitment to “obey the orders of the President of the United States,” which raises questions about the separation of powers between the executive and judicial branches of the federal government. Pappas said the military’s oaths and obligations can conflict with the commitment judges have “to due process and fair hearings.”
In his opinion, the military is providing temporary immigration court judges “to lubricate the deportation machine.” It also raises a financial conflict for some immigration judges, Pappas said, if they know they can lose their jobs and livelihood by following the law when it is “inconsistent with the policy objectives of this administration.”
“Both [political parties] have always interfered, but never to this extent,” said Pappas. “You have never seen huge swaths of judges being summarily dismissed like this before.”
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