SEATTLE — Federal prosecutors in Western Washington will no longer defend Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in many immigration habeas cases, after the U.S. Attorney's Office told the court it simply does not have the lawyers to keep showing up. In an October 26 letter to Chief U.S. District Judge David Estudillo, Acting U.S. Attorney Charles Neil Floyd wrote that his office “does not have the available resources, at this juncture, to continue entering AUSA appearances in every one of the dozens of § 2241 Immigration Petitions filed each week.” If no government lawyer files a notice of appearance within seven court days of the court's standard scheduling order, the letter says, the court may assume no response is coming and rule on the petition using only the petitioner's papers.
The letter has already freed a detainee. Baljit Singh, an asylum seeker from India, had been released under supervision while his asylum claim was pending, but ICE detained him in September after he and friends visiting Peace Arch Historical State Park ended up at the exit to the Canadian border. He was held at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, the detention centre where immigration detainees from across the Pacific Northwest are kept.
On Saturday, November 7, U.S. District Judge Tiffany M. Cartwright granted Singh's habeas petition, Raw Story reported. Because no government lawyer had appeared within the seven-court-day window, she treated the petition as “intentionally unopposed.” The government's answer was not even due until November 12, yet Cartwright ordered Singh released five days before that deadline and gave the government one day to comply. Final judgment was entered on Monday, November 9, and Singh walked out of the Tacoma facility.
Source: Raw Story, Nov 9 2026
What the U.S. Attorney's letter actually changes
The office is not walking away from habeas cases entirely. Floyd wrote that it will keep reviewing every petition and scheduling order, forward scheduling orders to ICE, and enter appearances and file responses “as the USAO determines appropriate.” It also reserves the right to appear in any case at any time. But in the cases it skips, the office says it will take no responsibility for moving them through the court and will not relay communications between the court and ICE. Release orders in those cases can be emailed by the court directly to the Northwest ICE Processing Center under a process already in place.
Floyd's stated reason is volume. He wrote that the surge of petitions, many of them copied from earlier filings, has hurt the office's ability to respond both to petitions that need real attorney work and to other civil litigation in the district. He also pointed to the work an appearance creates after a detainee is released or gets a bond hearing: status reports, supplemental briefing, oppositions to fee motions under the Equal Access to Justice Act, and show-cause orders over what he called “often technical violations” of the scheduling order.
Cartwright wrote that she knew of no precedent for the Justice Department declining to appear for a federal agency instead of filing a statement of non-opposition, but she accepted the letter as the department's official position. At least one other Western Washington petition has been granted unopposed since the letter, according to court records cited by Raw Story.
Why this matters for Indian and Punjabi families
A habeas petition under 28 U.S.C. § 2241 is often the only way a person held at the Tacoma centre can ask a federal judge to decide whether their detention itself is lawful. Singh's story — an asylum seeker from India, living under supervision, then re-detained after a park visit ended at the wrong border exit — is the kind of case Punjabi and Indian families in Washington State have been watching closely. Many detainees in Tacoma file handwritten petitions without a lawyer, and Seattle University law students have begun helping some of them under attorney supervision, KING 5 reported.
An unanswered petition is not an automatic win. The judge still has to find that the detention is unlawful, and without a government brief the judge looks for gaps in the record on their own. Petitions built on issues this district has decided many times — such as bond eligibility for long-time residents who entered without inspection, or the re-detention of people already living under supervision — are best placed to succeed. Lawyers say the practical signal to watch on any docket is now simple: whether a notice of appearance appears within the seven court days.
Colorado adopted a formal October 8 agreement between its U.S. Attorney's Office and the court clerk: if the government does not answer within seven days, the petitioner must be released within 24 hours. Washington's approach is different — a one-sided letter, not an agreement, and release is not automatic. A judge still decides each Washington case on its merits, which is why Judge Cartwright wrote a full merits order for Singh.
What happens next: because the U.S. Attorney's Office reserves the right to step into a case at any time, an unopposed start does not guarantee an unopposed finish, and whether fee requests will go uncontested in skipped cases is still an open question. Above all of it sits a bigger fight: whether ICE can hold many of these detainees without bond at all is headed to the Supreme Court in a mandatory-detention case, and that ruling could reshape the volume behind every one of these petitions. For Singh himself, the habeas win decides only his detention — he is out of Tacoma and back under supervision — while his underlying asylum claim remains a separate case still to be decided.