WASHINGTON, Feb 21, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – President Donald Trump said Wednesday
he is barring a US-born former Islamic State propagandist from returning
home, making the highly unusual case that she is not a US citizen.
Trump’s refusal to admit 24-year-old Hoda Muthana comes just as he is
pressing Europeans to repatriate their own Islamic State fighters and will
likely face legal challenges, with US citizenship generally extremely
difficult to lose.
Trump said on Twitter he has “instructed” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
“not to allow Hoda Muthana back into the country” — a break with usual US
protocol not to comment on individuals’ immigration issues.
“Ms. Hoda Muthana is not a US citizen and will not be admitted into the
United States,” Pompeo said in a terse statement.
“She does not have any legal basis, no valid US passport, no right to a
passport, nor any visa to travel to the United States,” he said, urging US
citizens not to travel to Syria.
Pompeo did not elaborate on the legal rationale for not considering the
Alabama native, who traveled to Syria on her US passport, a US citizen or
suggest where she might go instead.
But in one loophole that could boost the government case, Muthana’s father
had been a diplomat from Yemen — and children of diplomats are not
automatically granted citizenship.
Muthana’s lawyer, Hassan Shilby, showed a birth certificate that
demonstrated she was born in New Jersey in 1994 and said her father had
ceased being a diplomat “months and months” before her birth.
“She is a US citizen. She had a valid passport. She may have broken the
law and, if she has, she’s willing to pay the price,” Shilby told AFP at his
office in Tampa.
He said Muthana wanted due process and was willing to go to prison if
convicted.
“We cannot get to a point where we simply strip citizenship from those who
break the law. That’s not what America is about. We have one of the greatest
legal systems in the world, and we have to abide by it.”
– US-born and radicalized –
Just this weekend, Trump took to Twitter to chastise European allies who
have not taken back hundreds of Islamic State prisoners caught in Syria,
where Trump plans to withdraw US troops.
Comparatively few Americans have embraced radical Islam, with the Counter
Extremism Project at George Washington University identifying 64 who went to
join the Islamic State group in Syria or Iraq.
Muthana, raised in a strict household in Hoover, Alabama, said she was
brainwashed by social media messages and headed to Syria without her parents’
knowledge in 2014.
Shortly afterward, Muthana posted on Twitter a picture of herself and
three other women who appeared to torch their Western passports, including an
American one.
She went on to post vivid calls on social media to kill Americans,
glorifying the ruthless extremist group that for a time ruled vast swathes of
Syria and Iraq.
But with the Islamic State group down to its last stretch of land, Muthana
has said she has renounced extremism and wants to return home with her
toddler son, born to one of her three jihadist husbands.
“To say that I regret my past words, any pain that I caused my family and
any concerns I would cause my country would be hard for me to really express
properly,” she said in a handwritten note to her lawyer.
– Tough to lose US citizenship –
The US decision on Muthana comes amid rising debate in Europe on the
nationality of extremists. Britain recently revoked the citizenship of
Shamina Begum, who similarly traveled to Syria and wants to return to her
country of birth.
US citizenship is significantly more difficult to lose. The 14th Amendment
to the US Constitution, ratified in 1868 after Civil War as slavery was
abolished, establishes that anyone born in the country is a citizen with full
rights.
In recent years it has been considered virtually impossible to strip
Americans of citizenship, even if they hold dual nationality.
The US Supreme Court in the landmark 1967 Afroyim decision rejected the
government’s attempt to revoke the nationality of a Polish-born naturalized
American after he voted in Israel.
And last year a federal judge rejected a government attempt to strip the
nationality of a Pakistani-born naturalized American who was convicted in a
plot to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. But Trump has campaigned on a hard line
over immigration and raised the prospect of ending birthright citizenship
ahead of last year’s congressional elections.
In 2011, President Barack Obama ordered drone strikes that killed two
Americans in Yemen — prominent Al-Qaeda preacher Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-
year-old son — but did not believe it was possible to revoke citizenship.