The Justice Department plans to scrap longstanding rules and qualifications for immigration judges and create a new policy where it can appoint any lawyer it wants to temporarily preside over cases, reported Government Executive on Wednesday.

"The change gives Attorney General Pam Bondi wide latitude in selecting officials to oversee asylum and other cases pending before the Executive Office of Immigration Review, the Justice Department agency that runs the nation’s immigration courts," said the report. "That authority could provide President Trump with additional power to withhold legal status from immigrants and expedite his mass deportation efforts."

Immigration judges are different from typical so-called "Article III" judges, like the Supreme Court, courts of appeals, and district courts, who are constitutional officers appointed for life; they are instead "Article I" judges who were authorized by Congress to serve at the pleasure of the presidential administration and hear narrow types of subject matter issues.

"Since 2014, the department has allowed only former immigration judges, administrative law judges from other agencies or Justice attorneys with at least 10 years of experience related to immigration law to serve as temporary immigration judges, or TIJs," said the report. "In its update, to be issued Thursday as a final rule, EOIR called those parameters overly restrictive, noting it has hired fewer than a dozen temporary judges since the Obama administration put them into place."

The shortage of immigration judges available to hear cases has been a contentious issue for years, and was part of the reason for the massive backlog of cases for the surge of migrants in the years prior to the Trump administration.

A bipartisan immigration deal cut in the final years of the Biden administration would have established more funding for immigration courts to operate on an expedited basis; however, Trump worked behind the scenes to tank the deal among Republican lawmakers.