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Military lawyers will serve as immigration judges as courts face massive backlog
Court Watch |
2025/09/12 17:19
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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
Legal Interview |
2025/09/10 17:20
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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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New Orleans mayor pleads not guilty on corruption charges tied to alleged affair
Court Watch |
2025/09/08 00:19
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New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell pleaded not guilty Wednesday to conspiracy, fraud and obstruction charges stemming from an alleged romantic relationship with her bodyguard.
The Democrat appeared in federal court for the first time since a grand jury last month returned an 18-count indictment against Cantrell and her bodyguard, Jeffrey Vappie, outlining what prosecutors described as their yearslong scheme to conceal an affair while the two traveled, wined and dined together on taxpayers’ dime.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Karen Wells Roby ordered the mayor to surrender her passport and restricted her travel, instructing her to seek approval from probation officers to leave southeast Louisiana. Roby also told Cantrell she was not allowed to be in contact with Vappie.
Vappie has already pleaded not guilty to charges of wire fraud and making false statements after he was indicted in July 2024. He is scheduled to appear in court Friday for the additional charges.
Cantrell, the first female mayor in New Orleans’ 300-year history, was elected twice but now becomes the city’s first mayor to be charged while in office in a state with a reputation for public corruption. She has only four months before she leaves office under term limits.
The mayor once known for her outspoken persona has kept quiet about the charges in the weeks since the 18-count indictment against her and Vappie was announced in mid-August. She did not acknowledge the indictment during public appearances to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina late last month.
While walking into the court building, Cantrell remained silent as a mob of reporters pressed her with questions. After the arraignment, her attorney, Eddie Castaing, declined to comment on the case but said it would not affect the mayor’s ability to govern the city.
“She can continue to work with city employees, she just couldn’t talk about the case so that’s not going to impede any of the city operations, so it’s business as usual,” Castaing said.
Cantrell, who exited court through a side door to avoid reporters, was already receding into the background of city affairs over the past year and offered no apparent resistance to President Donald Trump’s suggestion earlier this month to send the National Guard and federal agents to New Orleans even as other Democrats bristled.
She’s also been cast as a pariah by U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner, who announced on Sept. 3 that Cantrell was suspended from involvement in federal transactions with HUD. The City Council issued a statement last week saying it had reassured the Housing Authority of New Orleans and the Office of Community Development that other city officials could sign federal contracts instead.
At times, she and her allies have said the blowback she is experiencing is tinged by double standards she faces as a Black woman. Cantrell said earlier this year, before to the indictment, that she has faced “very disrespectful, insulting, in some cases kind of unimaginable” treatment.
Cantrell and Vappie used WhatsApp for more than 15,000 messages, where they professed their love and plotted to harass a citizen who helped expose their relationship, delete evidence, make false statements to FBI agents “and ultimately to commit perjury before a federal grand jury,” acting U.S. Attorney Michael Simpson said. Vappie’s 14 trips with Cantrell cost taxpayers $70,000, not including Cantrell’s own travel costs, according to the indictment.
In a WhatsApp exchange, the indictment says, Vappie recalled accompanying Cantrell to Scotland in October 2021 on a dreamy trip “where it all started.”
Cantrell, whose husband died in 2023, has denied having anything more than a professional relationship with Vappie. She lashed out at associates who raised questions about the amount of time she spent with her bodyguard, including on wine-tasting trips and in a city-owned apartment, court records show.
Cantrell joins the ranks of more than 100 people brought up on corruption charges in Louisiana in the past two decades, said Rafael Goyeneche, a former prosecutor who is president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a watchdog group. |
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Washington, Oregon and California governors form a health alliance
Court Issues |
2025/09/03 20:00
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The Democratic governors of Washington, Oregon and California announced Wednesday that they created an alliance to safeguard health policies, believing the Trump administration is putting Americans’ health and safety at risk by politicizing the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The move comes with COVID-19 cases rising and as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has restructured and downsized the CDC and attempted to advance anti-vaccine policies that are contradicted by decades of scientific research. Concerns about staffing and budget cuts were heightened after the White House sought to oust the agency’s director and some top CDC leaders resigned in protest.
“The CDC has become a political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science, ideology that will lead to severe health consequences,” the governors said in a joint statement.
“The dismantling of public health and dismissal of experienced and respected health leaders and advisers, along with the lack of using science, data, and evidence to improve our nation’s health are placing lives at risk,” California State Health Officer Erica Pan said in the news release.
Washington state Health Secretary Dennis Worsham said public health is about prevention — “preventing illness, preventing the spread of disease, and preventing early, avoidable deaths.”
“Vaccines are among the most powerful tools in modern medicine; they have indisputably saved millions of lives,” Oregon Health Director Sejal Hathi said. “But when guidance about their use becomes inconsistent or politicized, it undermines public trust at precisely the moment we need it most.”
Partnership seeks expert medical advice
The partnership plans to coordinate health guidelines by aligning immunization plans based on recommendations from respected national medical organizations, said a joint statement from Gov. Bob Ferguson of Washington, Gov. Tina Kotek of Oregon and Gov. Gavin Newsom of California.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew G. Nixon shot back in a statement Wednesday that “Democrat-run states that pushed unscientific school lockdowns, toddler mask mandates, and draconian vaccine passports during the COVID era completely eroded the American people’s trust in public health agencies.”
He said the administration’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices “remains the scientific body guiding immunization recommendations in this country, and HHS will ensure policy is based on rigorous evidence and Gold Standard Science, not the failed politics of the pandemic.”
Florida announced Wednesday that it plans to phase out all childhood vaccine mandates as Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis plans to curb vaccine requirements and other health mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Meanwhile, public health agencies across the country have started taking steps to ensure their states have access to vaccines after U.S. regulators came out with new policies that limited access to COVID-19 shots.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s health department said last week it is seeking advice from medical experts and its own Immunization Advisory Committee on COVID-19 vaccines and other immunizations for the fall respiratory season.
The health department plans to provide citizens “with specific guidance by the end of September to help Illinois health care providers and residents make informed decisions about vaccination and protecting themselves and their loved ones,” Health Director Sameer Vohra said in a statement.
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