Secretive terrorist removal court set for first hearing in Afghan woman’s case

By Tierney Sneed, CNN

(CNN) — The Trump administration is testing a secretive, never-before-used deportation court for alleged alien terrorists with a case concerning the Afghan mother of a convicted terrorist, with the Justice Department accusing the Texas-based woman of having ISIS sympathies.

The Alien Terrorist Removal Court will have its first ever hearing Thursday at 11 a.m.ET, court documents made public Wednesday night revealed. The Justice Department is asking the court — which has lain dormant since it was created 30 years ago — to deport Nazira Haji Zada, whose son was convicted last year for an ISIS-aligned terrorist plot targeting the 2024 Election, according to the filings.

Zada herself has no criminal history, the court filings said. But DOJ described her in an unclassified summary of the case as having “worked to indoctrinate her children with ISIS ideology and have them pledge loyalty to ISIS.”

“The underlying information is classified because disclosure would enable terrorists and terrorist organizations to avoid preventative or detection measures or would reveal FBI or other U.S. Intelligence Community sources and methods by which such information is obtained,” the DOJ said in the unclassified summary.

Thursday’s court proceeding, an initial status hearing that will be held at the federal courthouse in DC, will be public. But many details about the DOJ’s case will be withheld from public view and even from the woman targeted in the proceedings. That highly-limited view that the alleged terrorist will have about the case against her— under procedures set forth in the 1996 law that created the court — has prompted some legal observers to question the court’s constitutionality.

The judges who sit on the ATRC fall under the judicial branch, making them more independent arbiters than the executive branch immigration judges that typically preside over deportation proceedings. The ATRC is made up of five US district court judges, and its chief judge, Joan Ericksen, is reviewing the current case.

The documents unsealed Wednesday provide additional details about how the proceedings have unfolded so far and include the judge’s order granting the DOJ’s initial application for the case to move forward in the court. In the order, she noted that, at that initial phase, the DOJ only had to clear a bar of probable cause. For the next phase — when the judge holds the removal hearing in the case — the DOJ will face a higher bar of evidence, the preponderance of the evidence standard. That standard is still lower than the beyond-reasonable-doubt standard in criminal cases.

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