Alabama woman who joined IS can’t return home, Pompeo says
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday that a woman who was born in the United States and joined the Islamic State four years ago did not qualify for citizenship and had no legal basis to return to the country.
In 2014, Hoda Muthana, then a 20-year-old student in Alabama, traveled to Turkey, hiding her plans from her family. She told them she was heading to a university event, but she was then smuggled into Syria, where she met up with the Islamic State.
With the militant group defeated in Syria, Muthana now wants to return home.
But on Wednesday, Pompeo issued a statement declaring that she “is not a U.S. citizen and will not be admitted into the United States.”
Pompeo said Muthana did not have “any legal basis, no valid U.S. passport, no right to a passport, nor any visa to travel to the United States.”
Muthana says she applied for and received a United States passport before leaving for Turkey. And she was born in the United States — ordinarily a guarantee of citizenship.
But U.S. officials seem to be hinging their argument against allowing her back in on an exception in the law.
Muthana’s father was a Yemeni diplomat, and children born in the United States to active diplomats are not bestowed birthright citizenship, since diplomats are under the jurisdiction of their home countries.
That law does not apply in Muthana’s case, said Charlie Swift, who is the director of the Constitutional Law Center for Muslims in America and is representing her family. Muthana, he said, was born a month after her father was discharged from his position as a United Nations diplomat.
After she joined the Islamic State, Swift said, Muthana’s family received a letter indicating that her passport had been revoked. Her father sent the government evidence of his nondiplomatic status at the time of his daughter’s birth but did not receive a response.
Swift said Muthana had been issued two U.S. passports: one when she was a child, and a renewal she applied for just before leaving for Syria. In the case of the first, he says that her father provided a letter from the United Nations proving that he had been discharged, to overcome the jurisdictional challenge.
Now 24, Muthana escaped IS-held territory in January, and is in a refugee camp in Syria with her young son.
Muthana is one of at least 13 people identified as Americans — almost all of them women and children — who are being held in detention camps by Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria. Many of them are facing similar issues as Muthana does, with their citizenship being challenged on technical grounds.
In contrast, a majority of American men caught on the battlefield were the subject of sealed indictments and have been repatriated to face charges.