Federal Prosecutors Stop Appearing in Many Washington ICE Detention Cases

Federal prosecutors in western Washington will no longer defend many cases filed by immigration detainees seeking release. The office confirmed the change Monday. Acting U.S. Attorney Charles Neil Floyd had sent it out in an Oct. 26 letter to Chief U.S. District Judge David Estudillo, a Biden appointee, telling the court it cannot keep answering the dozens of habeas corpus petitions filed in the district each week. A habeas petition asks a federal judge to decide whether the government is holding someone lawfully. Under the arrangement Floyd described, if no government lawyer shows up within seven court days of a scheduling order, a judge can treat the petition as unopposed and rule on the detainee’s papers alone. Floyd also told the court it could email release orders straight to the ICE facility in Tacoma. That has already happened. U.S. District Judge Tiffany Cartwright, another Biden appointee, ruled Saturday that the petition of Baljit Singh, an asylum seeker from India, was “intentionally unopposed” and ordered him released within one day. Cartwright wrote that she knew of no precedent for the Justice Department using its discretion this way. The government’s response in Singh’s case was not due until Nov. 12. Cartwright ordered him out five days early. Judge Kymberly Evanson, also put on the bench by Biden, granted an unopposed petition in Seattle the same weekend. The government had full access to the facts and offered no basis to rebut the petition, she wrote, and by sitting out the case it gave up whatever arguments it might have raised. A ProPublica tracker puts the district’s total near 2,000 since January 2025 and the nationwide count above 93,000 across the same stretch. Border czar Tom Homan has pegged the national figure at roughly 85,000. The caseload started with a July 2025 ICE memo. Someone picked up years after crossing illegally is now handled as a new arrival stopped at the border, which closes off any bond request to an immigration judge. Detainees who wanted out were left with federal court. Most federal appeals courts to reach the issue have ruled that holding immigrants with no bond hearing runs afoul of federal law. The Fifth and Eighth Circuits landed on the administration’s side. The Supreme Court agreed in October to settle the split. Floyd, before he ran the office, joined three other Washington judges in urging that immigration courts be stopped from setting bond for detainees.