Alabama

Hoda Muthana: Trump bars Alabama woman who joined Isis from US return

Donald Trump has said he ordered the state department to block an American-born woman who left Alabama to join Islamic State in 2014 from returning to the US.

Hoda Muthana, 24, told the Guardian this week that she regretted leaving the US to join the terrorist group and wants to return from Syria with her 18-month-old son.

US secretary of state Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday that the US will refuse to take Muthana back, saying she is “not a US citizen”.

The refusal to admit Muthana could set precedent and face legal challenges as it is generally extremely difficult to lose US citizenship.

In a brief statement that gave no details as to how the determination was reached, Pompeo said Muthana has no “legal basis” to claim American citizenship.

“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,” the secretary of state said. “We continue to strongly advise all US citizens not to travel to Syria.”

Trump claimed credit for the move, tweeting: “I have instructed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and he fully agrees, not to allow Hoda Muthana back into the Country!”

Muthana, who was captured by Kurdish forces after fleeing the last pocket of land controlled by Islamic State, has said she “deeply regrets” travelling to Syria four years ago to join the terror group and has pleaded to be allowed to return to her family in Alabama.

Speaking from al-Hawl refugee camp in northern Syria, Muthana, who was once one of Isis’s most prominent online agitators, said she had been brainwashed and had misunderstood her faith when she aligned herself with Isis.

A state department spokesperson on Wednesday echoed Pompeo’s remarks and said Muthana was not born a US citizen and has never been a US citizen.

Hassan Shibly, an attorney for the woman’s family, said the administration’s position is based on a “complicated” interpretation of the law involving her father.

“They’re claiming her dad was a diplomat when she was born, which, in fact, he wasn’t,” Shibly told The Associated Press. Hoda Muthana was born in 1994 in Hackensack, New Jersey, the lawyer said.

Muthana was born to parents from Yemen who became naturalized American citizens, according to the Counter Extremism Project at George Washington University.

Most people born in the United States are accorded so-called birthright citizenship but there are exceptions.

Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, a person born in the U.S. to a foreign diplomatic officer is not subject to U.S. law and is not automatically considered a U.S. citizen at birth.

Pompeo’s statement on Muthana – one of the few Americans among the hundreds of Europeans to have joined the ranks of the Islamic State group in Syria – is at stark odds with his calls on other countries to bring back and prosecute their own jihadist nationals.

In late 2014, shortly after moving to Syria, Muthana posted on Twitter a picture of four women who appeared to torch their Western passports, including an American one.

She went on to write vivid calls over social media to kill Americans, glorifying the 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 said she had renounced extremism and wanted to return home.

Muthana, who has been detained by US-allied Kurdish fighters, said that she had been brainwashed online and was ashamed of her past support for the militants. She was married three times and has a toddler son.

Alabama Woman Who Joined ISIS Can’t Return Home, U.S. Says

Mr. Pompeo’s statement did not offer a rationale for why the State Department does not consider Ms. Muthana a citizen. But American officials seem to be hinging their argument against allowing her back in on an exception in the law.

Ms. Muthana’s father was a Yemeni diplomat, and children born in the United States to active diplomats are not bestowed birthright citizenship, since diplomats are under the jurisdiction of their home countries.

That law does not apply in Ms. Muthana’s case, said Charlie Swift, the director of the Constitutional Law Center for Muslims in America, who is representing her family. Ms. Muthana, he said, was born a month after her father was discharged from his position as a United Nations diplomat.

After she joined the Islamic State, Mr. Swift said, Ms. Muthana’s family received a letter indicating that her passport had been revoked. Her father sent the government evidence of his nondiplomatic status at the time of his daughter’s birth, but did not receive a response.

Mr. Swift said Ms. Muthana had in fact been issued two American passports: one when she was a child, and a renewal she applied for herself just before leaving for Syria. In the case of the first, he says that her father provided a letter from the United Nations proving that he had been discharged, to overcome the jurisdictional challenge.

Hassan Shibly, a lawyer with the Council on American-Islamic Relations Florida who is advising the family, provided a birth certificate for Ms. Muthana that showed she was born in Hackensack, N.J., on Oct. 28, 1994.

Mr. Shibly said that her father left the foreign service in June 1994. He later sent a photograph of a document, on the letterhead of the United States Mission to the United Nations and signed by one of its representatives in 2004, that dated the official end of his service to Sept. 1, 1994. Ms. Muthana, Mr. Shibly said, “is trying to turn herself in to federal authorities and face consequences for her actions.”

Alabama unaffected by SCOTUS civil asset forfeiture ruling: State DA Association

Wednesday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling banning excessive fines through civil asset forfeiture will not impact Alabama because the state already has laws on the books that prevent disproportional penalties, according to the Alabama District Attorneys Association.

“In Alabama, criminal sanctions are required to be proportional to the underlying criminal activity under the excessive fines clause of the Eighth Amendment and also the Alabama Constitution,” said Barry Matson, executive director of the ADAA. “For almost 20 years, the state courts of Alabama have held this protection applies to forfeiture proceedings."

The Supreme Court heard an Indiana case where a $42,000 Range Rover was seized by the state from a man who was convicted of selling $400 worth of heroin. In a unanimous decision, the court ruled the seizure violated the Eight Amendment against excessive fines.

Matson added that while the court ruled that egregious fines like those in the Indiana case are unconstitutional, it did not ban civil asset forfeiture in general.

“I’d also point out that this case does not infer in any way that civil forfeiture is not a valid legal proceeding by the State,” Matson said. “Certainly, it was within the Supreme Court’s wheelhouse to have done so, and it did not."

Matson said that former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Perry Hooper made clear 20 years ago that excessive fines were not implemented in the state.

“As stated by Chief Justice Perry Hooper in 1999, ‘The forfeiture provisions of our code are subject to the excessive fines clauses of the Alabama Constitution, Art. I, § 15, and the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution,'" Matson said. “For the intervening two decades, state trial and appellate courts have consistently applied this rule of law.”