A terrorist deportation court convened for the first time in its 30-year existence Thursday morning, taking up the Trump administration’s request to remove an Afghan woman it accused of supporting an ISIS-inspired plot to carry out a mass shooting on Election Day in 2024.
The inaugural proceeding in the Alien Terrorist Removal Court in Washington was for Nazira Haji Zada, 47, of Fort Worth, Texas, who was arrested earlier this week. Prosecutors say she helped plan an attack that was to be carried out by her teenage son and another family member. They have not charged her with a crime.
Zada’s case, detailed in some documents posted on the court’s website late Wednesday, provides the first glimpse into a legal venue where prosecutors can rely on secret evidence — and an accused person does not have the otherwise fundamental right to challenge that it was illegally obtained.
During a roughly hour-long status hearing, Zada’s defense lawyers challenged the constitutionality of the court itself and asked for her to be released from federal custody.
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U.S. District Judge Joan Ericksen of Minnesota, who is serving as the court’s chief judge and was the only member of the five-person tribunal who attended the hearing, denied their request for release, indicating she would decide at a later hearing, possibly next week.
Zada, who had been in the United States as a legal permanent resident, entered the packed courtroom shortly after 11 a.m. wearing an off-white shawl with a decorative border and escorted by three U.S. marshals. She sat slouched in a swivel chair beside her attorneys as the judge outlined the hearing. Zada, who speaks Dari, listened through an interpreter.
Speaking slowly and deliberately, Ericksen noted that the case was a civil, not criminal, matter and vowed to follow the Constitution and the court’s governing statutes. “There may be moments,” she said, “that appear inelegant as we employ processes and procedures that have been dormant for the past three decades.”
Prosecutors read through a two-paragraph unclassified summary of FBI evidence, saying Zada had worked to indoctrinate her children with an “ISIS ideology” and concealed their mass-shooting plan from her husband. They said they had additional classified information they could confidentially present to the court to support why they say Zada qualifies for removal as a terrorist.
“Do you understand what the lawyer just said,” Ericksen asked.
Zada nodded yes.
Her son, Abdullah Haji Zada, and her son-in-law, Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, were previously convicted in the shooting plot. Her son was 17 at the time of his arrest in 2024, and Tawhedi is 28, according to the Justice Department.
In a news release, the DOJ called Nazira Zada “the matriarch of an alien Afghan family,” and said court documents in the criminal case say that the family, to raise funds for the attack, “started selling off their property, including furniture, computers, a mobile phone, and the family’s two vehicles.”
A declaration by a high-ranking Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, made public this week by the Justice Department, says that Nazira Zada’s husband was employed from 2009 until 2016 at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, a main hub for the United States military during the 20-year war in the country.
That declaration also said Nazira Zada was admitted to the United States as a lawful permanent resident in 2018, as a derivative on her husband’s immigrant visa application.
In court, Nazira Zada’s defense lawyers accused the Justice Department of trying to avoid charging her in criminal court, saying the proceeding and the limited unclassified evidence offered by the government violated her constitutional rights.
“This entire scheme is in violation of due process and unconstitutional,” Matthew Farley, a federal public defender, told Ericksen. “This is a runaround of bringing a criminal case,” he said, and an “attempt to lower the standard of evidence.”
Throughout the proceeding, the untested nature of the court was clear. At one point, the judge and lawyers spent several minutes reading through statutory language related to how the court should handle evidence in the case. The judge noted that the court had yet to set up an electronic filing system for briefs and other documents. It would be up and running “in the very near future,” she said.
The government’s attempt to move forward on the case earlier this month was slowed down, because Ericksen “had questions about the application and the evidence submitted to support it,” she wrote in court filings. That supplement is also classified, and only the cover page was posted publicly.
DOJ had initially planned to arrest the woman, fly her to the nation’s capital, and present her in court “all within the same day,” according to a court filing. However, a department news release said “Zada was arrested earlier this week.”
“This is a historic step asking this court for the first time to remove an individual from the United States who supported a plot by ISIS-sympathizing family members to commit an act of terrorism in America,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in a prepared statement. “No one should be allowed to come into our country and then betray it. The FBI and our Justice Department partners will not hesitate to use all available resources to protect the American people.”
It’s unclear what evidence the government has to accuse Nazira Zada of assisting her son and son-in-law. Her son, who faced terrorism charges, was sentenced to 15 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to receiving a firearm and ammunition to commit a terrorist attack.
Tawhedi, who is also accused of terrorism, underwent a psychological evaluation and was subsequently committed “for an additional period of evaluation and treatment” as per a judge’s order.
Before closing Thursday’s hearing, the judge asked if Nazira Zada understood her interpreters and accepted the representation by two federal public defenders.
She nodded her assent, then was escorted out by U.S. marshals.
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