On Sept. 30, the U.S. District Court ruled that Tacoma immigration judges were unlawfully declaring they can't issue bonds to many detained immigrants, often relegating them to months or years in jail-like conditions.

Yet Tacoma's immigration judges have continued to say they can't issue bonds, citing a purported lack of jurisdiction.

It's just a willful defiance of a federal court order," said Aaron Korthuis of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, which brought a class-action lawsuit resulting in the September judgment by District Court Judge Tiffany Cartwright.

U.S. Attorney for Western Washington Neil Floyd, who before his Oct. 6 swearing-in was a Tacoma immigration judge, countered in an interview last week that Cartwright's ruling is "an advisory opinion" that is not binding.

The disagreement raises yet another separation-of-powers question under a presidential regime full of them. This one, as others before it, is playing out against a backdrop of President Donald Trump's mass detention and deportation efforts.

It is not, as might first appear, a battle between two courts within the independent judicial branch of government. U.S. District Courts belong to that branch. But immigration courts are administrative bodies that belong to the executive branch, subject to the authority of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and the president.

Illustrating that authority, the administration has fired dozens of immigration judges, including one in Seattle, typically without giving any explanation.

Are immigration judges also subject to the authority of district court rulings like Cartwright's?

"It's a thorny area of law," said Elizabeth Porter, a University of Washington professor who teaches constitutional law. But her opinion, after reviewing several key documents in the case, is yes.

"The real problem here is that the executive branch is resisting the idea that its views of the law might be subject to oversight by this district court," she said. "But they're not outright defying it either, right? They're dragging their feet."

Tacoma's judges are granting bonds in some cases at the heart of the suit — but only after immigrants' lawyers go to district court for additional rulings naming specific individuals. Korthuis said he's worried that detained immigrants without lawyers, or with out-of-state lawyers unaware of the class-action ruling, will not realize this option is open to them.

Even some represented immigrants may find the delay in getting a bond has consequences. Seattle immigration attorney Ben Cornell said a client was transferred from the Northwest ICE Processing Center to a detention center in Mississippi while Cornell was challenging an immigration judge's decision that she couldn't issue a bond.

The ongoing legal wrangling has its origins in a practice that began in Tacoma's immigration court in 2022. That's when three of the court's then-four judges, including Floyd, began saying they don't have jurisdiction to issue bonds to many immigrants who had entered the country illegally. It was a novel legal theory at the time.

They relied on a section of convoluted immigration law that mandates detention, unless given an ICE reprieve, for immigrants who are "seeking admission" or "applicants for admission" to the U.S. The Tacoma judges held that even immigrants who had lived in the U.S. for decades are "applicants for admission" if they arrived unlawfully.

"It's a legal term of art to say that you've been admitted to the United States," Floyd said in the first interview he's given explaining his views on the matter.

"And if you think about it, it makes sense," he continued. By entering the country illegally, "No one's ever checked your background or determined whether or not you have authority to be here and whether or not you should be allowed to enter the United States. The fact that you've been here for a long time doesn't change that status legally."

But for years, immigration judges in Tacoma and across the country had applied that section of the law only to migrants just arriving in the U.S. The Northwest Immigrant Rights Project sued the federal government in March, arguing that immigrants residing in the U.S. for any length of time fall into a different section of immigration law allowing for bond.

Cartwright agreed. "If Congress had wished to enact the transformation of the immigration detention system that defendants contend it did — requiring the detention of millions of people currently living and working in the United States — then it would have said so more clearly," she said in her ruling.

Here's where it got tricky. The ruling, which the government had not appealed as of Friday, did not exactly order immigration judges to change their practice. Immigration law does not allow for direct orders in class-action cases related to some of its provisions, according to Korthuis of the immigrant rights project. Instead, Cartwright issued what is known as a "declaratory judgment," which renders an opinion on the law and the rights of all parties involved.

"Now the immigration court has a decision to make," said Floyd, whose office is defending the government in litigation on the bond cases. Immigration judges must determine "whether they're going to follow the opinion of Judge Cartwright or the direction of the controlling authority for them," the U.S. attorney said.

That controlling authority, Floyd said, is the Board of Immigration Appeals, also housed within the executive branch. In September, following the lead of an earlier U.S. Department of Homeland Security memo, the board issued a ruling making the Tacoma court's novel bond theory law national policy.

Tacoma's judges have been citing the appeals board's decision in continuing to say they lack jurisdiction to issue bonds, according to Korthuis.

The Tacoma court's office referred questions to spokespeople for the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the agency within the U.S. Department for Justice that oversees immigration courts. Neither that agency nor the Justice Department responded to requests for comment.

UW's Porter said she believes the U.S. attorney is wrong in his analysis of the district court ruling's import. "The fact that it's a declaratory judgment does not alter the balance of power here," she said. "The government should not have to be told what to do … It should respectfully do what our system dictates should happen when a federal Article Three court declares the law."

The Constitution's Article III provides for district and other federal judges who are part of the judicial branch.

Porter acknowledged, however, that the Tacoma judges may be caught in the middle between two branches of government. She noted they are sometimes specifying "alternative" bonds they would issue if they had jurisdiction.

That's what happened in the case of Pepe Luis Lopez, a 52-year-old grandfather with no criminal record who first came to the U.S. in 1989.

Lopez, who works for his son's construction company, was shopping for materials at a Home Depot store in the Yakima Valley on Sept. 11 when he was stopped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. According to Lopez, the officers didn't ask for his name and identification before they broke the windows of the van he was driving, pulled him out, pepper-sprayed him and put him facedown on the ground, handcuffing him and pressing their knees into his back.

The Department of Homeland Security didn't respond to a request for comment. Lopez's lawyer, Mozhdeh Oskouian, said ICE charging papers state Lopez didn't comply with officers' orders to roll down his window.

The charging papers also say that when officers stopped the van, they were looking for someone else who is the registered owner, according to Oskouian.

ICE, deducing Lopez had come to the U.S. illegally from Mexico, took him to the detention center in Tacoma. Like others detained there, he found the food abysmal. It was often frozen and portions were small, he said. He was also dismayed by lights that were always on, armed guards watching over him and others in the yard and separation from his family, he said.

His grandkids came to visit. "They would cry because I couldn't leave with them," he said in Spanish.

He had a bond hearing of sorts a month after his arrest in the Tacoma court, which is housed within the detention center. Judge Theresa Scala, assistant chief judge of the Tacoma and Seattle immigration courts, said she lacked jurisdiction to issue a bond but set an alternative one of $5,000.

"I started losing hope," Lopez said.

Within days, however, lawyers at the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project filed a so-called "habeas" petition, charging wrongful detention, with the district court on behalf of Lopez and four other detained individuals.

Cartwright, referring to her September ruling, granted the petition and ordered that the government either release Lopez or grant the alternative bond within one day. The government agreed to release him on $5,000 bond.

"We were so excited," said Karen Lopez Ramires, one of Lopez's five children. "We went straight to the bank. Then she and other family members drove to Tacoma to pick Lopez up.

Lopez has to periodically check in with ICE and remains in deportation proceedings. Because of the backlog in immigration court, his next hearing isn't until late 2029.

Lopez Ramires said that gives her father time to prepare for the worst-case outcome while living at home.

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