Hoda Muthana, ISIS bride, not U.S. citizen, judge rules

The woman who left the U.S. to join up with the Islamic State in 2014 is not an American citizen, a federal judge ruled Thursday.

Because Hoda Muthana, 25, is not a citizen, the U.S. has no obligation to let her return to America, Judge Reggie Walton ruled.

Ms. Muthana was born in the U.S. and was living in Alabama until the rise of ISIS, but her father was Yemen’s ambassador to the United Nations, a situation that is an uncontroversial exception to the Constitutional rule that persons born in the U.S. are automatically citizens.

However, Ms. Muthana argued, her father’s diplomatic status had expired at the time of her birth, making her automatically a citizen.

Judge Walton rejected that claim, which lacked contemporaneous proof that Ahmed Ali Muthana had abandoned his diplomatic status or had it revoked by Yemen.

Ms. Muthana has blown hot and cold on whether she wants to live in the U.S.

In 2015, when ISIS seemed to be on the rise and established a de facto state that it claimed to be the Muslim caliphate, she called for mass terrorism in the U.S.

Via Twitter, she called on American Muslims to assassinate then-President Barack Obama and “go on drivebys, and spill all of their blood.”

With the caliphate in ruins in 2019, Ms. Muthana, who was being profiled by NBC, BuzzFeed and other outlets, was being detained in al-Hawl refugee camp in Kurdish-controlled northern Syria.

She had a change of heart.

“I believe that America gives second chances. I want to return,” she told the Guardian.