DOJ avoids legal battle over secretive terrorism court
By Sophie Naimi · Reporting from Paris ·
The United States has finally dusted off a dormant weapon from its 1996 arsenal, and the first target was Nazira Haji Zada.
The Efficiency of the Legal Black Hole
The United States has finally dusted off a dormant weapon from its 1996 arsenal, and the first target was Nazira Haji Zada. As reported by NPR and PBS, the 47-year-old legal resident was deported to Afghanistan in September 2026 after becoming the first-ever case processed by the Alien Terrorist Removal Court (ATRC). The allegations are harrowing: Haji Zada is accused of supporting an ISIS-inspired plot to commit a mass shooting on Election Day 2024, radicalizing her children, and liquidating family assets—including her home—to fund a move to an ISIS-controlled territory. Her son, Abdullah Haji Zada, is serving 15 years; her son-in-law, Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, a former security guard at Bagram Air Base, pled guilty to providing material support to the Islamic State.
On the surface, this looks like a victory for public safety. But look closer at the machinery. The ATRC is not a court of law in any sense that a citizen of a democracy should recognize. It is a specialized vacuum designed to suck due process out of the room. According to Al Jazeera, this court allows the government to use classified evidence and a lower standard of proof for deportation, often denying the defense the right to see the very evidence used to condemn them. Attorney General Todd Blanche calls this a "win for national security and the rule of law." He is lying. You cannot claim to uphold the rule of law while simultaneously dismantling the procedural safeguards that define it.
The National Security Alibi
The most capable advocate for the ATRC would argue that the gravity of the threat—the specter of mass casualty attacks and the clandestine nature of global jihadist networks—renders standard criminal proceedings insufficient. They would point to the AK-47s and the 500 rounds of ammunition Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi attempted to procure as proof that the state needs "every tool at its disposal" to act with speed and secrecy. This is the strongest version of the state's case: that in the face of existential terror, the luxury of a transparent trial is a liability.
But this logic is a trap. We have seen this script before. The use of specialized frameworks to handle non-citizens was already being normalized in various 2017 United States federal court cases and again in 2019 United States federal court cases, where the "security" exception began to swallow the rule of law. When the state is allowed to decide, in secret, what constitutes "strong evidence," the court ceases to be an arbiter and becomes a rubber stamp for the executive. As Haji Zada’s attorneys, Matthew Farley and Mary Manning Petras, rightly argued, dragging legal residents into a process where evidence is hidden is a "plain violation of due process." The state isn't protecting the public from terrorists; it is protecting its own accusations from the scrutiny of a fair trial.
The Guantanamo Blueprint
The ATRC is not a new invention; it is the spiritual and mechanical successor to Guantanamo Bay detention. The parallel is absolute. Both systems rely on the creation of a modified legal geography—one physical, one procedural—where the designated "enemy" is stripped of the protections afforded to "normal" prisoners or residents. Just as Guantanamo Bay detention sought to hold "illegal enemy combatants" outside the reach of U.S. courts to avoid the "inconvenience" of habeas corpus, the ATRC uses classified summaries to bypass the discovery process. The shared mechanism is the "legal black hole": a space where the government acts as prosecutor, judge, and jailer, and where the defendant's only "right" is to be processed efficiently toward an exit.
This pattern of targeting the family unit as a site of radicalization is an old one, echoing the panicked rhetoric surrounding ISIS brides between 2014 and 2015. By framing the mother as the architect of the children's loyalty to ISIS, the state justifies a more aggressive, extra-judicial approach. But the result is the same: the erosion of the presumption of innocence.
The Conveyor Belt to the Border
The tragedy of Nazira Haji Zada’s deportation is not just the loss of her residency, but the precedent her case sets. We are now entering an era where the Department of Justice and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin will use the ATRC as a conveyor belt. They will target legal residents, label them "alien terrorists" based on classified memos, and ship them off to countries like Afghanistan—where, ironically, the Taliban-led government remains a bitter rival of the very ISIS ideology Haji Zada is accused of supporting.
The government expects the public to cheer because the defendant was "guilty" in the eyes of the FBI. But the voting booth is not the place for blind faith in the DOJ. What matters is whether we accept a system where the state can deport a legal resident without showing their lawyer the evidence. If the ATRC is allowed to stand, the "rule of law" becomes whatever Todd Blanche says it is. The Alien Terrorist Removal Court is not a tool of justice; it is a tool of erasure, and its first "win" is a permanent loss for the constitutional order.