"This landmark case, resulting in the prompt removal of this alien terrorist to her country of origin, is a win for national security and the rule of law. Those who support and condone terrorism should not be living in the United States, and this first-ever case before the ATRC shows how the Department will use every tool at its disposal to protect our country."
On Friday, September 11, 2026 — the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks — the Justice Department announced that Nazira Haji Zada, 47, an Afghan national and lawful permanent resident living in Fort Worth, Texas, had been removed from the United States in the first case ever brought before the Alien Terrorist Removal Court. Congress created the ATRC in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 to remove noncitizens where the evidence is classified; it consists of five district judges, provides paid counsel, and permits either party to appeal to the D.C. Circuit. No administration used it for thirty years. The application to remove Haji Zada was certified by Blanche — then acting attorney general, confirmed August 8 and sworn in August 10 — and filed on July 15, the same day the Senate Judiciary Committee opened his confirmation hearings. She appeared in open court for the first time on July 30 before Chief Judge Joan N. Ericksen of the District of Minnesota, who later signed the removal order. The government alleged she supported an ISIS-inspired mass shooting planned for Election Day 2024; her son Abdullah Haji Zada and son-in-law Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi were arrested and convicted in that plot. Under the statute the government used classified information to establish that she is an alien terrorist, and it also gave her two federal public defenders roughly half a terabyte of documents. Targets of these proceedings, including lawful permanent residents, may not review the classified evidence against them, and unlike criminal defendants they are barred from challenging how the government collected it. Her lawyers had initially said she would fight, and challenged the court's constitutionality as a violation of due process. At the July 30 hearing, Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General Hayden O'Byrne offered only general claims about the classified basis; Ericksen pressed for specifics, declined for the moment to rule on whether the defense must get access, said she would proceed on the working presumption above, and said she would require the department to state a reason and rationale for any withholding. Her attorney said the unclassified summary given to his client ran little more than two paragraphs, parts of it restating material already public from her son's Oklahoma criminal case. She then conceded that she is an alien terrorist and waived appeal, which terminated her status and made her permanently inadmissible. The court issued no ruling on the constitutional challenge. The removal order was signed on August 20 and remained sealed until September 11, when it was unsealed after she had already been returned to Afghanistan.
Covered the novelty and missed the disposal. The story ran as "obscure court used for the first time in thirty years," with the alleged plot, the concession and Blanche's statement, and in the better versions a paragraph on the secrecy rules and a line noting she had originally intended to fight. Nobody led with the outcome that actually changes the law, which is that there is no outcome: the first case in the tribunal's history produced a removal order and no ruling, so the due-process challenge to a court that lets the government withhold its evidence from the accused was extinguished by the accused. That is not a scandal and no one is alleged to have engineered it — a permanent resident facing classified allegations she could not see took the deal her lawyers could evaluate and she could not. But it means the only precedent the first use of the ATRC generated is that the ATRC works. Two more facts went almost entirely unreported. The certification is dated July 15, the day his confirmation hearings began, when he was acting attorney general. And the order sat sealed for twenty-two days and was unsealed on the anniversary of the attacks, after the subject was out of the country and out of appeals.
Entry #47 recorded the Attorney General as the officer commanded by executive order to prioritize prosecuting state and local election officials before November 3, and filed the arrangement rather than any crime. This is the same officer's other instrument, and it is the cleanest one in the file, because everything about it is lawful, documented and unreviewable. Congress built a court where the government may prove its case with material the target may not read and may not challenge the collection of; the statute names the Attorney General personally as the certifying officer; the certification and the seal and the timing of the unsealing are all his department's to control. The judge assigned to it pushed, on the record, toward giving defense counsel the classified file, and that pressure ended when the case ended. What the record now holds is a first-ever proceeding that established no limit on itself, a decision to activate a dormant tribunal announced as a win for the rule of law, and a sealed order made public on a date that supplied its own framing. The next application will be filed into the same silence, and the press has now written the template for covering it as a curiosity.