The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington says it no longer has enough staff to fight every immigration detention case filed against the government, and in many instances it will let judges rule without a government lawyer showing up. The change, disclosed in an Oct. 26 letter, means some petitions filed under 28 U.S.C. § 2241 can move forward without a response from the government if no lawyer appears within seven court days.
The office’s move matters now because it lands in the middle of a heavy habeas workload that keeps growing. Acting U.S. Attorney Charles Neil Floyd told Chief U.S. District Judge David Estudillo that his office does not have the available resources, at this juncture, to keep entering AUSA appearances in every one of the dozens of petitions filed each week. For people challenging detention, that can mean a judge may treat the petition as effectively unanswered even before the government’s official response is due.
That is exactly what happened in Baljit Singh’s case. U.S. District Judge Tiffany M. Cartwright granted his habeas petition after finding a plausible due-process claim, treated the filing as intentionally unopposed when no government lawyer appeared within the seven-day window, and ordered Singh released five days before the government’s answer deadline. It is a sharp example of how the new approach can change a detention case before the merits are fully joined.
The office’s position is not a total retreat. It said it will keep reviewing petitions and can appear in any case at any time, even while letting many cases proceed without a lawyer in the room. That leaves judges with the burden of deciding whether detention is unlawful on a record that may, at least for a time, be one-sided.
The staffing problem sits inside a broader surge. Last month, habeasdockets.org counted more than 1,400 active habeas cases in the Western District of Washington. TRAC data cited by The Hill said more than 8,000 habeas cases were filed in February 2026 and more than 9,000 in March 2026, while TRAC Reports found federal courts recorded 9,911 new immigration-related lawsuits that month. TRAC Reports also said civil immigration filings were up 1,278% from March 2021 levels and habeas lawsuits had increased more than 85 times over the preceding year.
That flood has left courts struggling to keep pace, months after the surge began. Judges interviewed by Law said the caseload crunch has delayed decisions in civil cases as they prioritize more urgent criminal and detention matters, and the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation has lost nearly 80 attorneys even as its workload jumped 63 percent. The new policy is a default, not a blanket refusal to litigate, but it makes clear that many Department of Justice immigrant release lawsuits will now move through court with no government lawyer at the first turn.
