If You Wanted to Test the Most Dangerous Court in America, You'd Pick a Monster. They Picked a 47-Year-Old Grandmother.
No charges. No criminal history. A green card and a classified file she will never be permitted to read.
If You Wanted to Test the Most Dangerous Court in America, You'd Pick a Monster. They Picked a 47-Year-Old Grandmother.
No charges. No criminal history. A green card and a classified file she will never be permitted to read.
The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #985: Thursday, July 30th, 2026
Let me tell you about a room.
It’s in Washington. It has judges assigned to it…five of them, real Article III judges, picked by the Chief Justice of the United States. It has a docket number system. It has a statute, 8 U.S.C. §§ 1531–1537…passed in 1996 and signed by Bill Clinton.
And for thirty years, it has been empty.
Not underused. Not quiet. Empty. Zero cases. Zero hearings. Zero applications filed.
By 2000, the Justice Department had looked at roughly a hundred candidates for this court and passed on every single one, according to a 9/11 Commission staff report.
Bush passed on it after 9/11….after 9/11…when the pressure to use every tool in the drawer was at maximum. Obama passed. Biden passed. Trump…in his first term…passed.
Ask yourself why.
Not because the tool was weak. Because the tool was radioactive.
On July 15…this administration picked it up.
What the room actually does
The Alien Terrorist Removal Court exists to deport people using evidence they are never permitted to see.
That is not a hostile characterization. That is the design. That is the entire reason Congress built the thing.
Here is how it runs:
The application is filed under seal, ex parte, in camera.
Only the government and the judge are in the room. The person whose life is on the table isn’t there. Neither is their lawyer.
The standard is probable cause…
…to get the case moving.
At the removal hearing itself, the government has to hit “preponderance of the evidence.” That’s 51%. A coin flip with a thumb on it.
Nowhere near “beyond a reasonable doubt,” because this isn’t a criminal trial. It’s a removal proceeding. Different rules. Lower bar. Same result for the human being at the end of it.
A green card holder can request a “special attorney”…
…with clearance to review the classified evidence; who is then forbidden by law from telling their own client what’s in it.
Think about what that lawyer’s job actually is. They know. They cannot say. They sit across from the person they represent…and hold the case against them in silence.
If you don’t have a green card, you get a summary.
A generalized one. Written by the people prosecuting you.
And the statute says the respondent “shall not be entitled to suppress evidence” they claim was obtained unlawfully.
Read that again slowly.
The ordinary remedy…for a government that breaks the law collecting evidence…is that the evidence goes in the trash. Here, Congress wrote that remedy out. Illegally obtained? Doesn’t matter. Comes in anyway.
Secret evidence. A lawyer sworn to silence. No suppression remedy. A 51% standard. And the exit is a plane.
Thirty years…nobody touched it. Now…we’re going to find out what it does.
The test case
Here’s the part that should make the hair stand up on your arms.
If you were going to test a courtroom this aggressive…a courtroom whose constitutionality has been questioned since the day it was written…you would want a defendant so plainly dangerous that nobody would look past them to the machinery.
That is not who they chose.
They chose Nazira Haji Zada, 47, of Fort Worth, Texas. A lawful permanent resident. A green card holder.
She has no known criminal history. She has never been publicly charged with a terrorism crime. That is not her lawyer’s claim. That is the government’s own position…in the government’s own filings.
What she has is a son.
Abdullah Haji Zada pleaded guilty last year in connection with an ISIS-inspired plot to attack voters on Election Day 2024…he and his brother-in-law bought two AK-47-style rifles and 500 rounds from an undercover agent.
He’s serving fifteen years. That case was real. That case was investigated…charged… tried in open court…and resolved. The system worked exactly the way it’s supposed to.
His mother was not charged in it.
Instead…DOJ has told the removal court…in an unclassified summary…that she worked to indoctrinate her children with ISIS ideology and have them pledge loyalty to the group.
The evidence for that is classified. She will not see it. Her lawyer… if cleared…cannot describe it to her.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has publicly called her the matriarch of an ISIS-sympathizing family.
Maybe the classified file is devastating. Maybe it’s airtight. I don’t know. Neither do you. Neither does she. That is the whole point of the room.
Where the plane lands
There is one more thing, and it is the thing almost nobody is saying out loud.
She’s Afghan.
Deportation is not an abstraction. It is a destination. And…the destination here…is a country run by the Taliban…for a woman the United States government has publicly branded an ISIS matriarch; ISIS being…among other things…the Taliban’s armed enemy.
The statute that built this court…is remarkably detailed about sealed filings and cleared attorneys and evidentiary standards. Legal scholars are already pointing out what it is conspicuously quiet about: who decides whether removal delivers a person into torture.
Congress built the fast lane…and absolutely and completely forgot the guardrail.
The honest counterargument
I’m not going to pretend this is simple, because it isn’t, and you deserve better than a piece that hides the other side.
The government’s position is coherent: sometimes intelligence…genuinely cannot be aired in open court…without burning a source or a method. Congress considered that problem and built a mechanism.
A federal judge…not an executive branch immigration officer…an actual Article III judge answerable to the D.C. Circuit…reviews it. The removal hearing will be public. The son’s plot was not imaginary; people were going to die.
Every one of those points is real.
And every one of them was equally real in 1997…and 2002…and 2009…and 2017… when the lawyers looked at this statute and decided the risk of testing it wasn’t worth taking.
Why this is the article you forward
Because precedent is not a one-time transaction.
If this works…if a green card holder with no criminal record can be removed from the country on evidence she is never shown…at a 51% standard…with her own attorney legally gagged…then it works the next time.
And the definition of “alien terrorist” is a statutory term…which means it is a term Congress can widen…and an administration can interpret.
Thirty years…five presidents…and roughly a hundred rejected cases stood as an informal safety catch on this statute. Not law. Just judgment. Just the accumulated instinct of career lawyers who kept deciding not yet…not this one…not worth it.
That catch came off on July 15.
The hearing is Thursday, 11:00 a.m. Eastern…in Washington…and it will be public. Watch what comes out of it. Watch whether anyone in Congress notices that a court they built…and quietly hoped would never open…is now taking cases.
The room isn’t empty anymore.
#HoldFast
Back soon.
-Jack
Jack Hopkins
P.S. If you have a member of Congress who sits on Judiciary or Homeland Security, the question to ask them is simple: did you know this court was being activated, and did anyone consult you? The answer, or the silence…is the next article.
Sources
The court’s own filings
Order Granting Application — Chief Judge Ericksen’s order letting the case proceed, and the order that lays out the probable cause and preponderance standards.
Order Granting Motion to Set Initial Hearing — sets Thursday’s public hearing.
The statute
8 U.S.C. §§ 1531–1537, “Alien Terrorist Removal Procedures” — the full text, including the sealed ex parte application requirement and the provision stripping the right to suppress unlawfully obtained evidence.
Federal Judicial Center: Alien Terrorist Removal Court, 1996–present — the official history confirming the court had never received an application.
News coverage
CNN: Secretive terrorist removal court set for first hearing in Afghan woman’s case
CNN: Trump has activated a secretive court for deporting ‘alien terrorists.’ Here’s what to know
CBS News: DOJ asking secretive court to deport Afghan woman in first-ever test case
CBS News: DOJ tests limits of secretive, never-before-used court
Fox News: Trump admin invokes 30-year dormant terror court — includes Acting Attorney General Blanche’s full statement.
Legal analysis
AILA: Trump Moves to Weaponize Decades-Old “Alien Terrorist Removal Court” — the immigration bar’s due process objections.
JURIST: Congress Built a Terrorism Court and Left Out the Torture Safeguard — the source for the gap on where deportees land.
JFC Jack.. I’m Native Hawaiian I’m pretty pale compared to my cousins since I’m in the Nor Cal..I can get very dark if I’m out in the sun.. this BS scares the fuck out of me. I was born in SoCal.. my father’s family is extremely high up on the food chain and in Hawai’i my Mother’s family is high on the food chain.. my entire life I’ve been asked.. what are you?? This is some epic bullshit the Orange Shitstain and company is doing. Every single day there’s another atrocity this administration shoves down our throats.. I’m wondering if it’ll ever stop.. Dumbt and company seem to only want wealthy white people in this country and the rest of us go elsewhere..FUCK TRUMP 🖕🏽 I’m not going anywhere..
More people are going to die because of this criminal clown car regime. They are the most heartless group I have seen together in forever. BiBi is on equal ground with them. These are criminals that keep setting fires so we don't focus on the truth or what happens next.
#HOLDFAST
Teri