Alien Terrorist Removal Court Deports Legal US Resident to Afghanistan in First-Ever Case

For the first time in its 30-year history, the Alien Terrorist Removal Court (ATRC) has been used to deport someone from the United States — and the person removed was a lawful permanent resident. According to NPR, Nazira Haji Zada, 47, of Fort Worth, Texas, was deported to Afghanistan after conceding that she is an “alien terrorist” and waiving her right to appeal. The landmark case, unsealed on Sept. 11 after her return to Afghanistan, has thrust a little-known tribunal into the center of a national debate over secret evidence and due process.

A Court Dormant for Three Decades

The ATRC was created by Congress in 1996 through Section 401 of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, codified at 8 U.S.C. §§ 1531–1537. As Wikipedia documents, the court is composed of five Article III district judges assigned by the Chief Justice of the United States for five-year terms, and it is modeled on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Appeals go to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and potentially to the Supreme Court.

Until this year, the court had conducted no proceedings whatsoever. No prior administration had ever filed an application, and legal scholars long speculated that the tribunal was left dormant over concerns about the use of secret evidence. As the government’s own filings note, the ATRC allows the government to establish that someone is an “alien terrorist” by a preponderance of the evidence — a lower standard than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” threshold of criminal proceedings — using classified information that the subject may never see.

The Case Against Zada

The government’s case against Zada was certified by Attorney General Todd Blanche and filed on July 15, 2026 — the first application in the court’s history. According to the Justice Department, prosecutors alleged that Zada, as the “matriarch” of an Afghan family, helped radicalize her relatives and supported a plot by her son and son-in-law to carry out an ISIS-inspired mass shooting on Election Day 2024.

“The allegations in this case show the matriarch of an ISIS-sympathizing family aiding in a plot to launch a mass casualty attack on American voters on Election Day,” Blanche said. “The Department’s application in this court makes clear that terrorists have no place in the United States of America.”

Zada was arrested in July at her Fort Worth home and appeared in open court for the first time on July 30 before ATRC Chief Judge Joan N. Ericksen, a senior judge on the District of Minnesota. The Justice Department said the government provided Zada and her two federal public defenders with approximately half a terabyte of documents supporting its case. In unsealed filings dated Aug. 20, Zada waived her rights to challenge detention and agreed to the deportation. Judge Ericksen ordered her removal the same day, and Zada is now permanently inadmissible to the United States.

Her son, Abdullah Haji Zada, who was 17 at the time of his arrest and prosecuted as an adult, was sentenced to 15 years in prison, with a judicial removal order to Afghanistan as part of his plea agreement. Her son-in-law, Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, 28, pleaded guilty on June 13, 2025, to two terrorism-related charges and awaits sentencing. Both men were arrested on Oct. 7, 2024, after buying firearms from an undercover FBI employee.

A Due Process Fight

The case has drawn intense scrutiny not only for what it decided, but for how. Zada’s court-appointed attorneys, Matthew Farley and Mary Manning Petras, contested the constitutionality of the proceedings, arguing they were not permitted to review the classified evidence used against their client.

“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,” the attorneys said in a statement. “We are confident that the Alien Terrorist Removal Court will be struck down as unconstitutional as soon as a judge is asked to address the issue.”

They added that their client’s choice to consent to the removal “should not be seen as an endorsement of this court’s legitimacy.” Because Zada waived her appeal, the constitutionality of the ATRC remains untested, and the government avoided a judicial ruling on the question.

At the July 30 hearing, Farley called the procedures “woefully inadequate,” noting to CNN that the unclassified summary given to Zada was just two paragraphs — one of which merely described her son’s and son-in-law’s prior convictions. “This entire scheme is in violation of due process and is unconstitutional,” he said.

Weighing the Legal Questions

Legal experts have long flagged the ATRC’s constitutional vulnerabilities. In an analysis for Just Security, Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck wrote that the statute “authorizes the government to remove someone from the country based on evidence the person being removed never sees and doesn’t meaningfully have an opportunity to contest” — a concern that is especially acute for lawful permanent residents, whose due process rights most closely approximate those of citizens.

Congress built in one safeguard for that group: under 8 U.S.C. § 1534(e)(3)(F), an LPR is entitled to a “special attorney” who can review classified evidence in camera and challenge its veracity on the person’s behalf — though the attorney cannot share that information with the client. The government said it provided Zada with such representation.

“Democratic legal systems abhor secret evidence,” Vladeck wrote, “not just because of the grave fairness concerns it can create but because of the corrosive effects of having these kinds of decisions made out of the public eye.” He concluded that the case argues for the “abolition of the ATRC — or, at the very least, substantial reform.”

Yet Vladeck also cautioned against overreading the case’s significance. Because the statute contemplates meaningful judicial review by Article III judges, he argued the ATRC cannot become a vehicle for “mass, summary deportations.” It is, he wrote, “a scalpel, not a bazooka.”

Judge Ericksen appeared to take that review role seriously. At the July hearing, she said that for each piece of information the Justice Department could not disclose, she wanted “a reason and rationale for why disclosure of that information would be detrimental to national security,” and that she would need “pretty strong” arguments to withhold classified information from the special attorney. She acknowledged the court was “dormant and untested for three decades” but expressed a commitment to proceeding with “fealty to the constitution.”

What’s Next

The deportation marks a significant expansion in how the government handles terrorism-related immigration cases, coming amid a broader push by the Trump administration to accelerate removals. But the central legal question — whether the ATRC itself is constitutional — remains open. Zada’s attorneys have signaled they believe it will eventually be struck down, and any future case that proceeds to appeal could force the D.C. Circuit, and possibly the Supreme Court, to confront the tribunal’s use of secret evidence directly. For now, the case stands as the first test of a court that spent three decades waiting, and that has now shown both its reach and the due process questions at its core.