{"id":792730,"date":"2026-07-30T05:23:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T05:23:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/792730\/"},"modified":"2026-07-30T05:23:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T05:23:15","slug":"secretive-terrorist-removal-court-set-for-first-hearing-in-afghan-womans-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/792730\/","title":{"rendered":"Secretive terrorist removal court set for first hearing in Afghan woman\u2019s case"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"paragraph-elevate inline-placeholder vossi-paragraph_elevate\" data-uri=\"cms.cnn.com\/_components\/paragraph\/instances\/cms6vok2e000x27p6c1v1d32f@published\" data-editable=\"text\" data-component-name=\"paragraph\" data-article-gutter=\"true\">\n            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.\n    <\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph-elevate inline-placeholder vossi-paragraph_elevate\" data-uri=\"cms.cnn.com\/_components\/paragraph\/instances\/cms6w8t8i00063b6ritjnsw59@published\" data-editable=\"text\" data-component-name=\"paragraph\" data-article-gutter=\"true\">\n            The Alien Terrorist Removal Court will<a href=\"https:\/\/www.atrc.uscourts.gov\/docs\/2026-TRC-1-Order%20Granting%20Motion%20to%20Set%20Initial%20Hearing.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\"> have its first ever hearing<\/a> Thursday at 11 a.m.ET, court documents made public Wednesday night revealed. The Justice Department is asking the court \u2014 which has lain dormant since it was created 30 years ago \u2014 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.\n    <\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph-elevate inline-placeholder vossi-paragraph_elevate\" data-uri=\"cms.cnn.com\/_components\/paragraph\/instances\/cms6w8t8i00073b6rf2mzwk5f@published\" data-editable=\"text\" data-component-name=\"paragraph\" data-article-gutter=\"true\">\n            Zada herself has no criminal history, the court filings said. But DOJ described her in an unclassified summary of the case as having \u201cworked to indoctrinate her children with ISIS ideology and have them pledge loyalty to ISIS.\u201d\n    <\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph-elevate inline-placeholder vossi-paragraph_elevate\" data-uri=\"cms.cnn.com\/_components\/paragraph\/instances\/cms6w8t8i00083b6rsu0g13gj@published\" data-editable=\"text\" data-component-name=\"paragraph\" data-article-gutter=\"true\">\n            \u201cThe 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,\u201d the DOJ said in the unclassified summary.\n    <\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph-elevate inline-placeholder vossi-paragraph_elevate\" data-uri=\"cms.cnn.com\/_components\/paragraph\/instances\/cms6w8t8i00093b6ruod2mk5t@published\" data-editable=\"text\" data-component-name=\"paragraph\" data-article-gutter=\"true\">\n            Thursday\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2014 under procedures set forth in the 1996 law that created the court \u2014 has prompted some legal observers to question the court\u2019s constitutionality.\n    <\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph-elevate inline-placeholder vossi-paragraph_elevate\" data-uri=\"cms.cnn.com\/_components\/paragraph\/instances\/cms6w8t8i000a3b6r5rzt1wgy@published\" data-editable=\"text\" data-component-name=\"paragraph\" data-article-gutter=\"true\">\n            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.\n    <\/p>\n<p class=\"paragraph-elevate inline-placeholder vossi-paragraph_elevate\" data-uri=\"cms.cnn.com\/_components\/paragraph\/instances\/cms6w8t8i000b3b6rnhxfdyjo@published\" data-editable=\"text\" data-component-name=\"paragraph\" data-article-gutter=\"true\">\n            The documents unsealed Wednesday provide additional details about how the proceedings have unfolded so far and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.atrc.uscourts.gov\/docs\/2026-TRC-1-Order%20Granting%20Application.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">include the judge\u2019s order<\/a> granting the DOJ\u2019s 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 \u2014 when the judge holds the removal hearing in the case \u2014 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.\n    <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Trump administration is testing a secretive, never-before-used deportation court for alleged alien terrorists with a case concerning&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":792731,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-792730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=792730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792730\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/792731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=792730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=792730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=792730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}