Charles Neil Floyd said the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington can no longer keep up with every Department of Justice immigrant release lawsuits case and will not enter a government appearance in many of the petitions filed each week under 28 U.S.C. § 2241. The shift means some detainees may get a ruling without a government lawyer showing up, if no appearance is filed within seven court days.
David Estudillo letter
The disclosure traces back to an Oct. 26 letter Floyd sent to Chief U.S. District Judge David Estudillo. 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 petitions filed each week.
He did not specify how many cases could be affected. A court may treat a habeas petition as effectively unanswered if no government lawyer files a notice of appearance within seven court days of the court’s standard scheduling order, but an unanswered petition is not a default judgment and a judge still must find the detention unlawful.
Baljit Singh ruling
The new approach already showed up in a case handled by U.S. District Judge Tiffany M. Cartwright. She granted Baljit Singh’s habeas petition after finding a plausible due-process claim and treated the petition as intentionally unopposed when no government lawyer appeared within the seven-day window.
Cartwright ordered Singh released five days before the government’s official answer was due. That sequence shows how the office’s staffing shortage can change the pace of an individual case before the government files a response.
Western District of Washington caseload
The office said it will keep reviewing petitions and reserves the right to appear in any case at any time. The practical limit is scale: habeasdockets.org counted more than 1,400 active habeas cases in the Western District of Washington last month, while federal filings surged nationally in February 2026 and March 2026.
TRAC Reports found federal courts recorded 9,911 new immigration-related lawsuits in March 2026 alone, with civil immigration filings up 1,278% from March 2021 levels and habeas lawsuits increasing more than 85 times over the preceding year. The Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation has lost nearly 80 attorneys while its workload jumped 63 percent, a strain that helps explain why the Western District of Washington is now choosing where to appear and where to let judges proceed without opposition.
The unanswered question is how many immigration detention cases in the Western District of Washington will actually move forward without a government appearance under the new approach. Floyd’s letter gives the rule, and Cartwright’s ruling shows how quickly it can change an individual case.
