The Trump administration is trying to ship an American citizen with alleged links to ISIS to Saudi Arabia without a trial — and without any assurances that he won’t simply be thrown into prison once he arrives on Saudi territory.The proposed move has no recent precedent and highlights President Trump’s willingness to veer outside of established legal practice as part of his hardline strategy for fighting Washington’s long-running war on terror.
The legal drama will come to a head Friday, when a federal appeals court will hear the Trump administration’s case for proceeding with the prisoner transfer. Earlier this month, a federal judge temporarily blocked the administration from sending the unnamed prisoner to Saudi Arabia because the government had “failed to provide” a persuasive argument for moving ahead with it. Now, the White House is trying again — and could make a grim kind of history if it gets its way.
“We are not aware of any case in American history where the government has tried to send away an American citizen,” Brett Kaufman a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which is defending the detainee, told me.
The Pentagon directed my request for comment to the Department of Justice, which did not respond.
The US government has never revealed the name of the citizen in question, who turned himself in to US-allied fighters in Syria. All court documents identify him as John Doe. The Justice Department has gone to extraordinary lengths to redact all legal filings and continues to argue that making details of the case public could “undermine” US diplomacy.
But the court battle continues, with the man sitting in a jail cell in Iraq while the Trump administration tries to find a way to exile him to Saudi Arabia.
The case has some echoes of President George W. Bush’s so-called “extraordinary rendition” program, in which CIA operatives sent terror suspects to 54 countries, several of which later tortured the prisoners.
But the new case has a key difference: It appears to be the first time in recent history that the government has tried to ship an American citizen overseas against their will and without any trial. If the administration prevails in court, the practice could easily be repeated in the fight against terrorism.
“If the government can hold him for seven and a half months and counting without a preliminary hearing, what’s to say they can’t hold any of us?” Steve Vladeck, a professor specializing in national security law at the University of Texas School of Law, said.
