TACOMA, Washington — An Indian asylum seeker named Baljit Singh walked out of the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma after a federal judge ordered his release on Saturday, November 7 — not because the government argued his case and lost, but because the government's lawyers never showed up at all. U.S. District Judge Tiffany M. Cartwright granted Singh's habeas corpus petition as “intentionally unopposed,” and final judgment in his case was entered on Monday, November 9, Raw Story reported. Singh's release is the first visible result of an extraordinary letter in which the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Washington told the court it no longer has the lawyers to defend Immigration and Customs Enforcement in every detention case filed against it.
Source: Raw Story via Immigration Analytics
The letter, dated October 26 and written by Acting U.S. Attorney Charles Neil Floyd to Chief U.S. District Judge David Estudillo, states the position plainly: 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.” Under the new approach, if no government lawyer files a notice of appearance within seven court days of the court's standard scheduling order in a habeas case, the court may assume no response is coming and decide the petition on the detained person's papers alone.
Source: U.S. Attorney's Office, Western District of Washington — Floyd letter, Oct 26, 2026
Who Baljit Singh is, and how he ended up in Tacoma
Singh is an asylum seeker from India whose claim was still pending, and who had been released under supervision while that claim moved through the system, according to the court order as reported by Raw Story. ICE detained him again in September, after he and friends visiting Peace Arch Historical State Park — the park that straddles the U.S.–Canada border at Blaine, Washington, a crossing point well known to the Punjabi community on both sides of the border — ended up at the exit to the Canadian border. From there he was held at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, the detention facility where most ICE detainees from across Washington and the Pacific Northwest are kept.
Singh did what detained people in his position can do: he filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus under 28 U.S.C. § 2241, the federal law that lets a prisoner ask a judge to test whether his detention is lawful. His scheduling order started the seven-court-day clock. No government lawyer appeared inside the window. The government's full answer was not even due until November 12 — but on November 7, five days before that deadline, Judge Cartwright treated the petition as intentionally unopposed, granted it on the merits of Singh's filing, ordered him released, and gave the government one day to comply. She 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 accepted Floyd's 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.
An undefended habeas petition is not an automatic release. The judge must still find the detention unlawful on the petitioner's own papers, and petitions built on grounds this district has ruled on many times — bond eligibility, re-detention of people already on supervision — are the best placed to win. The U.S. Attorney's Office also reserves the right to step into any case at any time. What has changed is who has to do the work: in the cases the office skips, the detainee's filing alone now carries the argument.
Why the prosecutors say they cannot keep up
Floyd's letter blames volume and what follows from it. The surge of petitions — many of them copied from earlier filings — has, he wrote, hurt the office's ability both to answer petitions that need real attorney work and to handle the district's other civil litigation. An appearance in a habeas case also creates work after a detainee is released or wins a bond hearing: status reports, supplemental briefing, oppositions to fee motions under the Equal Access to Justice Act, and show-cause orders over what Floyd called “often technical violations” of the scheduling order. The scale behind the letter is visible in the caseload: the grassroots tracker habeasdockets.org counted more than 1,400 active habeas cases in the Western District of Washington last month, KING 5 reported, and Seattle University law students have begun helping Tacoma detainees — many of whom file handwritten petitions on their own — under attorney supervision.
The office is not abandoning the docket entirely. It says it will keep reviewing every petition and scheduling order, forward scheduling orders to ICE, and enter appearances and file answers “as the USAO determines appropriate.” In the cases it skips, however, 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. Washington is the second federal district this fall to let government silence decide habeas cases — Colorado adopted a formal version in October, though there the arrangement is an agreement with the court and release follows a set timetable, while Washington's is a one-sided letter under which a judge still decides each case on its merits.
Why this matters to Punjabi and Indian detainees
The Northwest ICE Processing Center holds a large share of the Indian and Punjabi asylum seekers detained in the Pacific Northwest — people picked up at the northern border, at check-ins, or after years living under supervision in Washington and Oregon. For those families, habeas corpus has become the main legal door out of detention, and until now it was a door the government contested almost every time. Under the new approach, a detainee whose papers are in order and whose case fits the grounds this district has already accepted may now win release in days after the appearance window closes, instead of waiting through a full round of government briefing. The other side of the change is risk: a badly drafted petition, filed without a lawyer, now gets no second look from anyone — there is no government brief for the judge to test it against, and no prosecutor in the case to catch an error in a release order's path to Tacoma.
What happens next
The signal to watch in every pending Western Washington habeas case is now a simple docket entry: a notice of appearance by a government lawyer within seven court days means the case will be fought; silence means the judge may rule on the detainee's papers alone, and Floyd's letter itself predicts most petitions will move faster as a result. Open questions remain — whether fee requests will also go uncontested in skipped cases, whether the office steps back into high-profile cases it first passed on, and how reliably emailed release orders reach the right officers at the Tacoma facility, the handoff point that has already caused delays in Colorado's version of the system. Above all of it sits a bigger case: whether ICE can hold many of these detainees without bond at all is headed toward the Supreme Court in a mandatory-detention dispute, and that ruling could reshape the volume that produced this letter in the first place.
For Baljit Singh, the sequence is already complete: detained in September after a wrong turn at a border park, freed in November because the government's lawyers, by their own written admission, could not be in his case and in dozens of others at the same time. His asylum claim itself remains pending — habeas decided only that he could not be held while he waits.