Alabama woman who joined ISIS can’t return home: US

President Donald Trump said Wednesday the United States would not readmit an American-born woman who travelled to Syria to join the Islamic State and now wants to come home.

The woman, Hoda Muthana, does not qualify for citizenship and has no legal basis to return to the country, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said.

In 2014, Muthana, then a 20-year-old student in Alabama, travelled to Turkey, hiding her plans from her family. She told them she was heading to a university event.

In fact she was smuggled into Syria, where she met up with the Islamic State and began urging attacks in the West.

Now, with the militant group driven out of Syria, Muthana says she is deeply sorry, but US officials appeared intent on closing the door to her return.

Trump said in a post on Twitter that he had directed the secretary of state “not to allow Hoda Muthana back into the Country!”

Pompeo issued a statement declaring that she “is not a US citizen and will not be admitted into the United States.”

Pompeo said Muthana did not have “any legal basis, no valid US passport, no right to a passport, nor any visa to travel to the United States.”

Muthana says she applied for and received a US passport before leaving for Turkey. And she was born in the United States — ordinarily a guarantee of citizenship.

Pompeo’s statement did not offer a rationale for why the State Department does not consider Muthana a citizen. But US 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 birth right citizenship, since diplomats are under the jurisdiction of their home countries.

That law does not apply in Muthana’s case, said Charlie Swift, the director of the Constitutional Law Centre for Muslims in America, who is representing her family. Muthana, he said, was born a month after her father was discharged from his position as a United Nations diplomat.

Now 24, Muthana escaped ISIS-held territory in January, and is in a refugee camp in Syria with her young son.

© 2019 New York Times News Service