The human cost of the Trump administration’s immigration surge has been staggering, measured in detained parents, deported neighbors, and people held for months without ever seeing a bond hearing. There’s a second casualty, too: a Justice Department that no longer has the lawyers to keep up with the mess its own policy created.

In an October 26 letter to Chief U.S. District Judge David Estudillo of the Western District of Washington, the self-styled Acting U.S. Attorney Charles Neil Floyd told the court that his office just doesn’t have the lawyers to keep defending the immigration detentions the administration keeps churning out. Per Floyd, the office “unfortunately 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.”

Floyd opens by praising the district’s streamlined habeas procedures, which he helped craft, as working “to the benefit of petitioners, the government, and the public interest.” Then comes the “however”:

Since the General Order was first issued, however, the influx of § 2241 Immigration Petitions has continued to increase. The large volumes of petitions that are being filed, often copying from other petitions, has severely impacted the government’s ability to respond to specific petitions that require appreciable attorney time from the USAO to investigate and analyze. It has also negatively impacted the government’s ability to respond to other civil litigation filed against the government in the District.

Among the burdens Floyd lists: having to “oppose EAJA motions,” which are the fee requests from the lawyers who beat the government. He also complains about responding to “motions and orders to show cause stemming from what are often technical violations of the scheduling order.” Way to downplay the government missing court deadlines.

So the government will be sitting a lot of these out. “Thus, going forward, in order to conserve resources, there will be many habeas cases in which the USAO will no longer assume responsibility for providing a defense on behalf of the respondents,” Floyd wrote.

If no government lawyer appears within seven court days of a scheduling order, the court can rule on the petitioner’s papers alone. In those cases, Floyd wrote, the office “will take no responsibility for facilitating the processing of the case through the District Court nor will it serve as a conduit for communications between the District Court and respondents in the case.” So the government’s lawyers won’t defend ICE, and they won’t pass along the judge’s messages to ICE either. Release orders can instead be emailed straight to the Northwest ICE Processing Center. Floyd’s assessment is that the “change is expected to significantly streamline and expedite the resolution of most habeas petitions, providing more discretion to the District Court.”

Meanwhile, the office he’s running is itself a legal mess. Floyd got the top job in Seattle after Attorney General Todd Blanche fired Roger Rogoff, the court-appointed U.S. Attorney, within an hour of his appointment. A federal judge has since ruled that Rogoff is the rightful officeholder, which is how we ended up with two guys in Seattle calling themselves US Attorney, neither confirmed by the Senate. The government has appealed.

None of this should surprise anyone who’s been watching the department empty out. More than 10,000 federal lawyers have left the government since the start of 2025, and DOJ alone has shed 21% of its attorneys. The department’s answer has been to recruit AUSAs over Twitter, lean on forward-this-to-a-friend referrals, lower its hiring standards, and offer $25,000 signing bonuses to anyone willing to take on immigration cases. The lawyers who stayed are so buried that one handling habeas petitions in Minnesota asked a judge to hold her in contempt so she could get some sleep. Border czar Tom Homan recently told Fox News that the courts are dealing with roughly 85,000 immigration habeas cases. About 2,000 of them have been filed in western Washington since January 2025, and when Floyd took over last year, DOJ said he’d be leading an office of about 85 attorneys.

Seattle is just the first office to put the impact of the brain drain in writing. As the DOJ’s anti-migrant surge keeps wiping out what’s left of the department, it won’t be the last.

The flood of habeas petitions didn’t come out of nowhere. It exists because the administration has been holding people without bond hearings, a policy Floyd helped pioneer. As an immigration judge in Tacoma, he was one of four judges who started denying bond hearings in 2022, years before the Trump administration took the theory nationwide. When U.S. District Judge Tiffany M. Cartwright ruled the practice unlawful last year, Floyd, by then U.S. Attorney, dismissed her decision as “an advisory opinion.” The question is now before the Supreme Court.

The letter became public when it was filed as an exhibit in the case of Baljit Singh, an asylum seeker from India. Singh was detained in September after he and some friends accidentally ended up at a Canadian border exit while visiting a state park. On Saturday, the same Judge Cartwright labeled his petition “intentionally unopposed” and ordered him released within 24 hours.

Which, for Singh, is great news. As a statement about the United States Department of Justice, it’s mortifying, and it *should* make the government rethink its catastrophic immigration policy. It won’t, but it should.

Earlier: There Are Two Guys In Seattle Calling Themselves US Attorney. Neither Was Confirmed By Senate.
10,000 Federal Lawyers Are Gone And Trump’s Response Basically Confirms Why They Left
Trump’s Anti-Migrant Surge Is Now A Mudslide That’s Wiping Out What’s Left Of His DOJ
DOJ Puts Up $25K And Retention Bonuses To Bribe Lawyers To Rack Up Ethics Violations
Pam Bondi’s DOJ Lowers Hiring Standards After Driving Away Lawyers With Actual Experience
DOJ Lawyer Asks To Be Held In Contempt So She Can Sleep
Once-Elite DOJ Is Now Desperate For Lawyers, Resorts To ‘Forward This To A Friend’ Recruiting
DOJ Begging For AUSAs On Twitter Like They’re Putting Together A Kickball League
DOJ Posts Star Wars-Themed Tweet Seeking Recruits Who Misunderstand The Whole Point Of Star Wars
The DOJ Dishonors Program Is Having Trouble Finding Takers

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1

The post Trump’s DOJ Ran Off So Many Lawyers It Can’t Even Show Up To Keep People Locked Up Anymore appeared first on Above the Law.

Since the General Order was first issued, however, the influx of § 2241 Immigration Petitions has continued to increase. The large volumes of petitions that are being filed, often copying from other petitions, has severely impacted the government’s ability to respond to specific petitions that require appreciable attorney time from the USAO to investigate and analyze. It has also negatively impacted the government’s ability to respond to other civil litigation filed against the government in the District.

Seattle is just the first office to put the impact of the brain drain in writing. As the DOJ’s anti-migrant surge keeps wiping out what’s left of the department, it won’t be the last.