DOJ Ejects Green Card Holder Using Alien Terrorist Removal Court

Attorney General Todd Blanche invoked the Alien Terrorist Removal Act for the first time ever to expel Nazira Haji Zada, a lawful permanent resident from Afghanistan, from the country for allegedly being the “matriarch” who helped radicalize her Islamic extremist family members.

According to court filings unsealed Friday, Haji Zada waived her rights to challenge her detention and was deported back to Afghanistan last month.

“Nazira Haji Zada, 47, an Afghan national previously residing in Fort Worth, Texas, was removed from the U.S. after conceding that she is an alien terrorist. As the matriarch in her family, she supported a plot to commit an ISIS-inspired mass shooting on Election Day in 2024 for which her son and son-in-law were previously arrested and convicted,” the Justice Department announced.

Haji Zada became a permanent resident in 2018, as her husband worked as an assistant to the U.S. military on Bagram Air Base, one of the largest U.S. bases in Afghanistan. Her son, Abdullah Haji Zada, and son-in-law, Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, pleaded guilty to attempting to purchase two AK-47-style rifles and 500 rounds of ammunition from an undercover FBI agent in order to carry out a terrorist attack in Oklahoma in 2024. Abdullah was sentenced to 15 years in prison, while Tawhedi is still awaiting sentencing.

Investigators noted that Haji Zada, however, had no knowledge of their plans.

The Alien Terrorist Removal Court, created after the 1996 Oklahoma City Bombing, allowed to DOJ to circumvent charging suspected terrorists in criminal court and instead allows them to be removed from the country over “terrorist activity.”

“Under the law, terrorist activity includes not only serious offenses … but also providing, whether voluntarily or under duress, housing or transportation to what the law defines as a ‘terrorist organization.’ Statutorily, the term terrorist organization includes even ‘a group of two or more individuals, whether organized or not,’ who have hijacked a vehicle or used a firearm to cause substantial damage to property—a threshold virtually any criminal gang would meet,” the Brennan Center for Justice notes. “As the courts have acknowledged, these terms encompass ‘more conduct than our society, and perhaps even Congress, has come to associate with traditional acts of terrorism.’”

It is also much easier for the government to secure approval for an individual’s removal, as it only has to prove a “preponderance of evidence” rather than the traditional, more strenuous “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The DOJ also reportedly refused to show classified evidence to Haji Zada’s attorneys, even though they had a security clearance.

“Dragging lawful permanent residents into court but refusing to show them or their attorneys the evidence that will be used against them is a plain violation of due process,” Haji Zada’s public defenders said, adding that they expect the decision to be rejected as “unconstitutional.”

Two U.S. citizen teenagers who were on their way to file enlistment papers to join the Marines were violently attacked by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, who reportedly detained them for nearly eight hours before letting them go. 

Telemundo reports that agents pepper-sprayed the teenagers because they were allegedly filming ICE arresting parents outside of Santos Livas Elementary School in Alamo, Texas. ICE agents were caught on video pulling one teen from the car and punching him repeatedly in the face while he lay on the ground. The other teen, Luis Ochoa, said he informed the ICE agents he was a citizen but was told, “I don’t give a damn.… Your parents can’t help you now.”  

Ochoa is reportedly rethinking his decision to enlist, with his mother telling Telemundo, “How are they supposed to serve a country that doesn’t even uphold their basic rights?” 

The Trump administration is already making it clear it has no interest in upholding those rights. Military service has no effect on this regime’s mass deportation agenda, with agents freely targeting the family members of service members and recruits without any fear of reproach. The two teens didn’t even experience the worst of ICE. ICE agents routinely attack people in public, shooting and killing targets as well as bystanders regardless of legal status. Sometimes people have been held in ICE custody for months. Still, the agency has received record amounts of funding with virtually no accountability.  

Donald Trump Jr.’s new wife defended her husband’s “dear friend” Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, following a bombshell report that he dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars on their wedding.

In a post on Instagram Monday, Bettina Trump claimed that it was merely a coincidence that the lavish weekend getaway had turned into a last-minute wedding celebration.

“The weekend that followed had actually been planned well in advance as a fun weekend with friends. It was never intended to be our wedding weekend. When our original wedding plans changed, we simply decided to get married before it and arrived at an already planned weekend as newlyweds,” she wrote. (Her post included a picture of a personalized matchbook inscribed for “Don & Bettina”— a thoughtful detail for a supposedly impromptu wedding party.)

“Our dear friend Umar very generously hosted two nights of celebrations for us AFTER our wedding. It was an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend, and something for which we were and remain incredibly grateful.”

Of course, it really couldn’t matter less whether it was intended to be their actual wedding weekend or not. It was still a wildly expensive vacation on a Russian oligarch’s dime—one who’s deep in Putin’s pocket.

The original ProPublica report specified that Kremlev was not present at the private 18-person wedding ceremony, but he and a sizable delegation of Russians were attendees to the roughly 50-person afterparty. Kremlev rented out a private island where the reception was held, and guests were housed for $100,000 per night. He paid an estimated $70,000 for a massive fireworks display, and his team even helped plan the festivities.

Bettina insisted it was all innocent fun. “Friendship doesn’t require a political motive. Generosity doesn’t automatically come with an agenda. And sometimes a wedding gift is simply a wedding gift,” she wrote on Instagram. When it comes to Russian oligarchs rubbing elbows with the president’s son, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Florida will likely send a right-wing extremist to its state House of Representatives.

Florida state House of Representatives nominee Marshall Rawson marched in the 2017 neo-Nazi “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

New reporting from Talking Points Memo Monday revealed that Rawson and his wife marched in the racist parade as part of the League of the South, a neo-Confederate, pro-secessionist group. He can even be seen in video near James Alex Fields Jr., the neo-Nazi who drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters and killed Heather Heyer.

Rawson, 34, also ran a violently racist anonymous Twitter account, and has been involved with the League of the South since at least 2014, when he was a college student at Shorter University. In 2023, he advocated for a religious justification for slavery.

Once he did run for office in 2026, he got $15,000 in donations from individuals who identified as or had ties to white nationalists, according to an analysis from TPM. He even received $200 from Kristine Duke, the daughter of infamous Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. Now he will likely win the general election in Florida’s 10th district in November.

The League of the South is an extremely racist organization. Its leader Michael Hill has called for the group to “restore the South as White Man’s Land” and has long advocated for secession.

“I pledge to be a white supremacist, a racist, an anti-Semite, a homophobe, a xenophobe, an Islamophobe, and any other sort of ’phobe that benefits my people, so help me God!” Hill wrote in 2016.

Two years earlier, he posted a picture of Rawson at a League of the South event, while writing that “Southern Nationalism is the cutting edge and the wave of our future for Southern youth.”

Rawson claims to have ended his relationship with the League of the South, even as he continues to receive donations from white supremacists, uses his campaign to elevate white nationalist dog whistles, and pledges to “stand up to the radical left and protect our heritage and values.”

The Florida GOP fully supports Rawson in all his bigotry, and has yet to comment on TPM’s report. Rawson did offer a statement.

“Over the entire span of my adult life, I’ve been very active defending historical monuments from destruction or removal, and I feel that way about almost all monuments, not just those associated with southern history,” he told TPM. “I don’t screen my donors, and I put in tens of thousands of requests for donations by email, text, and phone. I’ve been extremely transparent about my campaign agenda, and any donation to my campaign is presumably an endorsement of my agenda and not my campaign’s endorsement of a donor’s views or agenda. Obviously, I’m not privy to any conversation you reportedly had with any donors and cannot speak to those conversations.”

This post has been updated.

Donald Trump thinks JD Vance is “terrific,” but he still isn’t ready to endorse his number two guy in the 2028 race.

Speaking with reporters on the tarmac of Shannon International Airport in Ireland Sunday, Trump claimed that it was “too early” to throw his weight behind Vance’s highly probable bid for president.

“I think he’s terrific, he’s got so many terrific people,” Trump said as the engines of Air Force One blared nearby. “I just think they’re all very good, but JD is fantastic.”

Vance is the early Republican front-runner in the 2028 race, though he has not yet formally announced his candidacy. Despite playing coy, the vice president received widespread support for his potential bid at the Republican midterm convention last week, where the attending crowd repeatedly chanted, “JD! 48!”

Vance has stressed that his decision hinges on the results of the midterm election cycle.

“We got to take care of business this November. Then we’ll worry about what comes next,” Vance said at the convention.

Other Republican presidential contenders include Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who last ran for America’s highest office against Trump in 2016) and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Some prediction sites—including City & State and Kalshi—are including Trump in the lineup as well, despite the fact that he is term-limited.

Vance, however, has an extra edge above his conservative competitors as the heir apparent to Trump’s MAGA movement.

A national polling average compiled by Race to the White House found that—as of September—Vance has a 40.6 percent chance of beating out the rest of the GOP field. Rubio is behind him, with a 21.9 percent chance, while Donald Trump Jr. is in third, with an 8.8 percent chance of winning.