OPINION:
On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the Justice Department announced a first: An Afghan permanent resident had been deported through the Alien Terrorist Removal Court.
Congress created that court in 1996. It took 30 years for an administration to bring a case.
Nazira Haji Zada was accused of supporting the Islamic State group-inspired plan of her son and son-in-law to massacre Americans on Election Day 2024. The plot is said to have involved two AK-47 rifles and 500 rounds of ammunition.
According to prosecutors, the family began selling possessions to finance the attack. Haji Zada signed a contract to sell the house. Relatives had one-way tickets to Kabul; the two prospective attackers would stay behind.
Both men were convicted. Haji Zada was never criminally charged. With lawyers representing her, she conceded that she qualified as an alien terrorist and waived appeal. She is now out of the country.
The Trump administration should build on this result. Prosecuting the men who planned to pull the triggers did not settle what to do about the woman accused of helping them. Her case required its own evidence and its own legal grounds. It did not require the government to obtain a criminal conviction before seeking her removal.
Deportation can uproot a life. That is why the government must prove its case, not why every removal must become a criminal trial. The question in one proceeding is whether a person should be punished for a particular offense; in the other, whether the law permits that foreign national to remain.
Requiring identical proof would erase a distinction deliberately made by Congress.
The court has a tightly defined role. The government must possess classified information supporting terrorism allegations and show that ordinary removal proceedings would risk national security. A federal judge must approve the application.
The burden at the removal hearing is a preponderance of the evidence, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. None of this licenses deportation on an official’s say-so. Nor does it justify the use of a special court when ordinary proceedings will suffice.
The difficult cases turn on what can be disclosed. A source’s name may be blacked out while the date of a meeting, a location or a reported conversation gives him away. Remove those details, however, and the person accused may have no meaningful way to answer.
That is the problem this court was built to confront.
In Haji Zada’s case, the Justice Department says it provided her and her two public defenders with approximately half a terabyte of documents. Her attorneys still argued that the evidence withheld from them made the process unconstitutional. Their objection cannot be answered by counting files. Her agreement to leave did not settle it either.
The statute generally requires an unclassified summary sufficient to prepare a defense. Without an adequate summary, the case can proceed only upon additional judicial findings concerning the dangers of disclosure and continued presence.
For permanent residents, a special attorney then examines and challenges the classified evidence. The government should defend that arrangement in a contested case while accepting that judges may require changes. An anticipated appeal is a reason to prepare, not to surrender.
In 2017, Germany’s Federal Administrative Court upheld the deportation of a Nigerian national born in Germany, with permanent residence, who had threatened terrorist violence. In June 2025, Schleswig-Holstein used the same statutory power to remove a Bosnian national deemed an Islamist security threat.
America has different evidentiary rules, but the principle is hardly exotic: Residence rights can be substantial without making security-based removal impossible.
The 9/11 Commission’s staff found that ordinary immigration proceedings sometimes made America’s special court unnecessary. It also found that the FBI withheld information from immigration authorities, leaving cases stalled or never brought. Those cases did not fail before a judge. They failed to get there.
The attorney general should put the next sound case before this court and seek a removal order. No criminal conviction is required. The statutory grounds must be proved. Once they are, a green card should offer no shelter from the consequences of supporting terrorism.
Haji Zada is back in Afghanistan. That is what enforcement looks like. It should not take another anniversary to see it again.
• Kevin Cohen is the CEO of RealEye and a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and The Spectator.
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