CBS News reports DOJ seeks to transfer Afghan woman’s deportation bid to rarely used “alien terrorist” court

The Department of Justice asked a secretive federal court created roughly three decades ago to allow removal proceedings targeting an Afghan woman prosecutors allege is an “alien terrorist,” CBS News reported. The case is described by the network as the first time the court has been convened since it was created, setting up a test of how the government’s post-1990s counterterrorism deportation framework is applied in practice.

CBS News identified the woman as Nazira Haji Zada and said prosecutors are seeking deportation under the government’s “alien terrorist” framework tied to national security immigration enforcement. According to the report, the government is asking the court to remove her based on allegations that she is linked to terrorism, including an asserted association with ISIS, as characterized by prosecutors.

The court at issue is described in the CBS report as “secretive,” and the reporting says it has never convened since its creation about 30 years ago. The request, as characterized by CBS, would be made through a limited-access judicial process that is intended to handle certain sensitive national security issues without the same level of public proceedings typical of ordinary immigration cases.

Because the Department of Justice is the party making the request, the filing would be central to how the government balances public immigration adjudication with classified or otherwise restricted national security information. If the court agrees to proceed, it could shape how future terrorism-related deportation petitions are handled and what evidentiary and procedural standards apply at the “front end” of removal.

Civil liberties groups and defendants’ counsel often argue that the secrecy and specialized structure of such courts can make due process harder to assess in real time, while government officials generally contend the approach is necessary to protect sensitive intelligence sources and methods. In this matter, CBS News presented the filing as an effort by prosecutors to use the court’s procedures as the “first-ever test case,” a description that would make the court’s willingness to act on the request a procedural milestone.

The next step, if the court receives the government’s request as reported, would be the court’s handling of whether it will consider the petition and what procedures it will set for the parties. Until a Department of Justice filing or court docket entry is reviewed, officials have not confirmed the specifics of what the court was asked to do, the statutory basis cited, or whether any scheduling orders have been issued.