The Justice Department announced on September 11, 2026 that it has removed a foreign national from the United States through the Alien Terrorist Removal Court (ATRC) — the first time in the court’s 30-year history that the government has used it. USCIS confirmed its role in the case on its official social media accounts, describing the operation as part of a coordinated interagency effort.
According to the Justice Department, Nazira Haji Zada, 47, an Afghan national who had been living in Fort Worth, Texas, conceded that she is an alien terrorist. The government alleged she supported her family’s ISIS-inspired plot to carry out a mass shooting on Election Day in 2024. The removal order was issued on August 20, 2026 by Chief Judge Joan N. Ericksen, and the removal was carried out in the weeks that followed. The Justice Department’s National Security Division, the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service, DHS Homeland Security Investigations, and USCIS all participated.
A court that sat unused for 30 years. Congress created the ATRC in 1996 as part of the counterterrorism legislation passed after the Oklahoma City bombing, codified at 8 U.S.C. §§ 1227(a)(4)(B), 1531 and 1534. It was designed to let the government remove suspected terrorists while protecting classified evidence from disclosure. No Attorney General had ever applied to use it until July 2026, when the court held its first-ever hearing. Legal scholars have long attributed that dormancy to due process concerns about secret evidence.
How the procedures differ. The ATRC is not ordinary immigration court. Where a lawful permanent resident is the respondent, the presiding judge must appoint a “special attorney” who may review the classified evidence and challenge its veracity — but is barred, on penalty of fine or imprisonment, from disclosing any of it to the noncitizen or to their own counsel. The court’s constitutionality has never been tested by a reviewing court.
What it means. For the overwhelming majority of immigrants — including employment-based petitioners in the EB-2 NIW, EB-1A and H-1B categories — this case changes nothing procedurally. The ATRC’s jurisdiction is narrow and reaches only noncitizens the Attorney General certifies as alien terrorists. Its significance is precedential: a removal mechanism that Congress built and then left untouched for three decades is now live, and the administration has signaled it is prepared to use it again.
Attorney General Todd Blanche called the case “a win for national security and the rule of law.”
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Source: X (Twitter) @USCIS