Charles Swift, a former Navy commander and director of the Constitutional Law Center for Muslims in America, filed the complaint in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, seeking to oblige the Trump administration to recognize Muthana as a US citizen, the Daily Caller reported.
“Citizenship is a fundamental constitutional right, the most valuable right you will have. If it can be taken away, then it must be done with due process of law. Where citizenship is concerned, that’s a judicial hearing. There has to be a process. You can’t simply say it. You would have to prove it,” Swift said, cited by the Washington Post.
Muthana was born in Hackensack, New Jersey, to father Ahmed Ali Muthana, who is a former Yemeni diplomat. She attended the University of Alabama at Birmingham but ran away to become a member of Daesh in 2014. According to the Guardian, she became one of Daesh’s most prominent online agitators. However, speaking from al-Hawl refugee camp in northern Syria, Muthana said she was brainwashed at that time and misunderstood her faith and now deeply regrets it.
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“I look back now and I think I was very arrogant. Now I’m worried about my son’s future. In the end, I didn’t have many friends left, because the more I talked about the oppression of Isis the more I lost friends. I was brainwashed once and my friends are still brainwashed,” she told the Guardian.
Whether Muthana is a citizen of the US could hinge on when her father was discharged from his position as a diplomat, according to the Washington Post. Her lawyers claim they can prove her father was no longer a diplomat when she was born on October 28, 1994. However, the government insisted that his termination was not officially documented until February 1995, thus revoking Muthana’s passport in 2016 during the Obama administration as she deemed not to be a birthright citizen of the US.
*Daesh (ISIL/ISIS/Islamic State), a terrorist group banned in Russia and many other countries.