Secret U.S. Court Gets Its First Case and Its First Deportation

For three decades, the Alien Terrorist Removal Court (ATRC, created by Congress in 1996) sat on the books but never once convened. This summer, President Donald Trump’s administration activated it for the first time and used it to deport a lawful permanent resident without ever showing her or her attorneys the classified evidence against her.

The case involved Nazira Haji Zada, 47, an Afghan-born woman living in Fort Worth, Texas. The Justice Department alleged she was the “matriarch” of a family tied to a foiled 2024 Election Day terror plot. Her son, Abdullah Haji Zada, and son-in-law, Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, were arrested in October 2024 after purchasing two AK-47-style rifles and 500 rounds of ammunition from an undercover FBI agent, allegedly intending an ISIS-inspired mass shooting. Both men later pleaded guilty in federal criminal court in Oklahoma. Abdullah, who was 17 at the time of his arrest but charged as an adult, was sentenced to the statutory maximum of 15 years. An unclassified FBI summary alleged that Nazira “supported [the] conspiracy,” “pledged loyalty to ISIS,” and “worked to indoctrinate her children with ISIS ideology.”

Violating Due Process

What makes the case unusual is not the allegation, but the forum. Rather than charging Haji Zada criminally or processing her through the ordinary immigration-court system, the Justice Department filed the first-ever case before the ATRC, a specialized tribunal Congress created specifically to let the government use classified evidence to deport suspected terrorists without disclosing that evidence in open court, on the assumption that public disclosure would threaten national security. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche framed the move as fulfilling the court’s original purpose: “Congress created the Alien Terrorist Removal Court three decades ago to remove from the United States alien terrorists who never should have been here in the first place.”

Haji Zada’s court-appointed attorneys, Matthew Farley and Mary Manning Petras, initially signaled they would fight the case, arguing that the tribunal’s secretive procedures violated due process and other constitutional protections and that they themselves were not permitted to review the evidence being used against their client. Last month, however, Haji Zada and the government reached an agreement: Rather than continuing litigating, she consented to removal and was deported to Afghanistan. Her attorneys emphasized that this should not be read as validation of the court’s legitimacy, though. “Dragging lawful permanent residents into court but refusing to show them or their attorneys the evidence that will be used against them is a plain violation of due process,” they said in a statement.

Past Is Prologue?

The United States may be harking back to an older established pattern. In 1919, the government deported anarchist agitator and naturalized citizen Emma Goldman, putting her aboard the USS Buford, nicknamed the “Soviet Ark,” along with roughly 249 other radicals rounded up in the Palmer Raids under the era’s anarchist-exclusion laws. The government rationalized that foreign-born agitators whose political loyalties lay with a hostile ideology abroad, rather than with the United States, had no claim to remain. 

Constitutional Issues Not Resolved

Because the modern case of Nazira Haji Zada ended in a negotiated agreement rather than a full hearing, the core constitutional issues have not been resolved. Chief ATRC Judge Joan Ericksen did not take additional steps to scrutinize the government’s arguments after granting initial approval for the case to proceed — meaning that it is not clear whether the United States will revert to its age-old habit of forcibly removing foreign-born agitators, or if another court will rule on the side of the late-20th century’s normalization of divided loyalties.

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