The attorney for the family of a U.S. woman who joined the Islamic State and married an Islamic State fighter said President Trump is “undermining birthright citizenship” by not allowing her come back into the country.
“Hoda is not asking to stroll on home with a free pass like nothing happened,” the attorney, Hassan Shibly, told CNN Thursday. “What’s she’s actually asking is to be held accountable to our legal system, to have the due process that any American citizen is entitled to.”
Hoda Muthana, 24, left Alabama in 2014 to join the Islamic State in Syria, and her lawyer says she is a U.S. citizen who was born in the U.S.
“She is an American citizen,” Shibly said, defending Muthana from critics who say her dad was a diplomat when she was born. “Hoda is willing to pay the debt she owes to society, including facing jail time for the mistakes that she’s made after she was brainwashed by ISIS.”
Attorney for Hoda Muthana’s family tells @jimsciutto Trump is “undermining birthright citizenship.”
“She is an American citizen…Hoda is willing to pay the debt she owes to society including facing jail time…after she was brainwashed by ISIS.” https://t.co/ULM2ig9RI4 pic.twitter.com/qcCBroqgXo
— CNN Newsroom (@CNNnewsroom) February 21, 2019
People born in the U.S. are awarded birthright citizenship, but exceptions under the Immigration and Nationality Act say that a person born in the U.S. to a foreign diplomatic officer is not automatically considered a U.S. citizen at birth.
The Trump administration said Wednesday that it would not allow Muthana to come back to the U.S., claiming that her father was a diplomat.
Shibly, however, told the Associated Press that her father did not have diplomatic status at the time of her birth in Hackensack, N.J. in 1994.
Muthana surrendered last month with her toddler son to the coalition fighting ISIS and said she is being held in a detainee camp in northeastern Syria. She said she wants to come home to the U.S. and regrets joining ISIS.
“I realized how I didn’t appreciate or maybe even really understand how important the freedoms that we have in America are. I do now,” she wrote to Shibly. “To say that I regret my past words, any pain that I caused my family and any concerns I would cause my country would be hard for me to really express properly.”
