‘Rule by tyranny’: American-born woman who joined ISIS must be allowed to return

If the American-born woman who joined the Islamic State in Syria and now wants to return home is a citizen of the United States, what is she owed by her government?

The lawyer suing the U.S. government for her return says Hoda Muthana, 24, deserves more than a letter announcing her denaturalization. “And certainly,” said Charles Swift, a former Navy commander and the director of the Constitutional Law Center for Muslims in America, “more than a tweet.”

President Trump announced in a tweet on Wednesday that he had instructed his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, “not to allow Hoda Muthana back into the Country!” Pompeo proclaimed in a statement the same day that she “is not a U.S. citizen and will not be admitted into the United States.”

The case of the “ISIS bride” raises complex questions about indoctrination and violence, as well as about birthright citizenship. It parallels one that has divided Britain, where the British government has moved to strip citizenship from Shamima Begum, who left London in 2015 to join the Islamic State at the age of 15. Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, protested that the teenager had a “right to return.”

The lawsuit in U.S. federal court contends that Muthana, who was 20 when she left, enjoys an equivalent right. It seeks to compel the Trump administration to recognize her citizenship, which the young woman’s attorneys say she acquired at the time of her birth in Hackensack, N.J., and to “accept Ms. Muthana and her son back into the United States and to use all available means to do so.”

“When the Constitution ceases to rule, then it’s rule by tyranny,” Swift said in an interview Thursday with The Washington Post.

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