An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent looks on as an individual is detained outside a home, August 27, 2026. REUTERS/Vincent Alban
A federal judge wrote that she knew of no precedent for the Justice Department declining to appear for ICE rather than formally telling the court it won’t contest a case, after prosecutors in Seattle told the court they lacked the resources.
U.S. District Judge Tiffany Cartwright wrote it Saturday in an order freeing Baljit Singh, an asylum seeker from India who was being held at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma.
According to his petition, Singh had been released under supervision while his asylum claim was pending when, in September, he and friends traveled from California to Peace Arch Historical State Park and “inadvertently went to the exit at the Canada border.” He was then detained.
Last month, Singh filed a habeas petition to challenge his detention, but the government never answered.
Cartwright treated it as “intentionally unopposed” because no government lawyer appeared within seven court days, a window the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Western Washington laid out in an Oct. 26 letter to the court, her order said.
“[The U.S. Attorney’s Office] unfortunately does not have the available resources, at this juncture, to continue entering [prosecutor] appearances in every one of the dozens of [immigration detention petitions] filed each week,” Acting U.S. Attorney Charles Neil Floyd wrote in the letter.
“Thus, going forward, in order to conserve resources, there will be many habeas cases in which the [office] will no longer assume responsibility for providing a defense on behalf of the [government],” he added.
The flood of petitions “has severely impacted the government’s ability to respond” to cases that take real attorney work, and to other lawsuits against the government, Floyd wrote. When no prosecutor appears, he told the court, it “may proceed to rule on the merits of the petition based on the papers filed by the petitioner.” In those cases, the office said it would not help move them through the court or relay communications between the court and ICE, according to Cartwright’s order.
“The American judicial system is fundamentally adversarial,” Cartwright wrote. Judges rely on the parties to frame the issues, she explained, rather than investigating cases themselves.
“While the Court is not aware of any precedent for the Department of Justice exercising its discretion by declining to appear on behalf of a federal agency or officer rather than filing a non-opposition statement, the [office’s] letter from October 26, 2026 is the official position of the Department,” she wrote.
Prosecutors in Colorado, who face their own flood of detention cases, have kept filing short responses telling judges they will not contest the petitions, Colorado Politics reported.
Floyd’s office has gone a step further. In many of its cases, no prosecutor will appear for the government at all.
In the cases Floyd’s office skips, a detainee can now win release without the government ever arguing in court to keep him locked up.
The government’s answer to Singh’s petition was not due until Nov. 12, under the court’s scheduling order. Cartwright ordered him released five days before that deadline and gave the government one day to release him, her order said.
Floyd’s letter told the court it could email release orders straight to ICE. At least one other petition has been granted unopposed after the letter, court records show.
The shortage Floyd described did not stop him from joining the administration’s fight over Washington’s ballots.
On the same day Floyd wrote that his office lacked “the available resources” for every detention case, he and Pete Serrano, the top federal prosecutor in Eastern Washington, sent Secretary of State Steve Hobbs (D-WA) a list of 405 voters they said were noncitizens, CBS News reported. They asked that those voters’ ballots be set aside until their citizenship could be confirmed.
“This is only the tip of the iceberg,” Floyd said, according to CBS.
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Jamal Whitehead barred Floyd, Serrano and other officials from demanding that Washington leave those ballots uncounted.
In Singh’s case, his lawyer filed a report on his release Monday, and the court entered final judgment in his favor the same day, court records show.
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