On Friday, September 11th, the Alien Terrorist Removal Court unsealed a deportation order for an Afghan woman who was accused of supporting the Islamic State in the first-ever use of the Alien Terrorist Removal Court. The deportation was the first time the Justice Department invoked the court, which Congress created in 1996 under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, to allow the use of classified information in immigration cases sensitive to national security.
The court’s inaugural case, which Court Watch first reported, after a 30-year lull, represents an initial victory for the Justice Department in testing the Alien Terrorist Removal Court as another route to pursue President Trump’s immigration agenda. Unlike in traditional immigration courts, a U.S. district judge ordered the respondent, Nazira Haji Zada, removed from the U.S., finding that the government had met its evidentiary burden that she was likely a noncitizen who posed a national security threat to the U.S.
Prosecutors argued that Haji Zada, a 47-year-old Texas woman, had knowingly supported her family’s radicalization and a plot hatched by her son and son-in-law to attack a federal polling location in November 2024 on behalf of the Islamic State. Prosecutors also alleged Haji Zada’s role in the plot was to help relocate the rest of the family to Islamic State-controlled territory in Afghanistan. Haji Zada’s son was sentenced in November 2025 to 15 years in prison after pleading guilty to planning the attempted mass shooting.
The court’s structure would have allowed prosecutors to present classified evidence in a removal hearing to Judge Ericksen against Haji Zada while withholding it from Haji Zada and potentially her attorneys. Plans for that removal hearing, however, were upended when Haji Zada apparently agreed to concede to the government’s accusations that she was a noncitizen terrorist.
On July 30th, Chief Judge Joan Ericksen presided over the court’s first and so far only public hearing. At the hearing, attorneys from the Federal Public Defender’s Office for the District of Columbia representing Haji Zada said they would lodge multiple objections to the court’s constitutionality, which legal scholars have questioned.
Judge Ericksen’s deportation order was filed on August 20th, but was not unsealed until today. According to the order, Haji Zada was deported back to her home country of Afghanistan.
