WASHINGTON – A court created in 1996 to deport suspected alien terrorists using classified evidence, empowered by Congress in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, and left entirely unused for thirty years received its first case last Wednesday. The Trump administration filed a sealed petition with the Alien Terrorist Removal Court on July 16. The court’s five judges, none appointed by the president, acknowledged almost immediately that they were not fully prepared for what arrived.
The public record from the filing is a single page. The respondent’s identity is withheld. The specific allegations are classified. Chief Judge Joan Ericksen, a federal judge from Minnesota who presides over the five-member court, said the judges had “questions about the nexus that the government alleges” regarding the respondent’s actions, and ordered the Justice Department to provide additional documentation by the following Wednesday.
That judicial hesitation is itself historically significant. Ericksen is the first judge in the Alien Terrorist Removal Court’s history to evaluate a nexus question, because no nexus question has ever been presented before. The court was created by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. Thirty years. No cases.
The mechanism works on specific terms. The Attorney General or Deputy Attorney General must personally approve any petition before it can be filed. Proceedings are conducted under seal. The government may use classified evidence the respondent’s attorney is not cleared to see. A public hearing is eventually required, but the burden of proof sits with the government. A person qualifies for ATRC review if the government demonstrates they have engaged in terrorist activity, endorsed terrorist activities, or belonged to organizations that encourage such activities, a definition broad enough to encompass association rather than only direct action.
The suggestion to use the court came from an unexpected source. James Boasberg, a Washington federal judge who has presided over several high-profile immigration detention cases, flagged the ATRC in a 2024 ruling as a potential venue for national security deportation proceedings the government was routing through standard immigration courts. Boasberg noted the forum existed and had never been used. The Trump administration has now followed that roadmap, filing a petition that PBS NewsHour confirmed is the court’s first in its history.
The court’s structure differs from other national security tribunals in one notable way. The five judges who sit on the Alien Terrorist Removal Court are not appointed through the presidential nomination and Senate confirmation process. Chief Justice John Roberts makes the appointments, a design intended to insulate the court from political pressure. In practice, it insulated the court from any use at all, until last week.
Due process concerns flow directly from the court’s design. A respondent in ATRC proceedings may not have access to the full evidence against them; their attorney must hold appropriate security clearance to participate in classified portions of any hearing. The process is less transparent than even the specialized FISA court system, which operates under decades of judicial interpretation and institutional oversight. The ATRC has no equivalent record, no body of prior rulings, and no case law of its own to define its limits, because there was nothing to interpret.
The administration’s choice of the ATRC over standard immigration courts or criminal proceedings is deliberate. Previous administrations faced comparable national security deportation questions and reached for existing, tested tools: criminal prosecution, immigration proceedings supplemented by classified evidence review, or FISA-related mechanisms with established judicial oversight. The ATRC was always available. No administration touched it. The pattern of reaching for extraordinary legal instruments in sensitive proceedings has been a consistent feature of the administration’s second term across multiple agencies and legal domains.
What happens next depends on Chief Judge Ericksen and the additional documentation the Justice Department submits. If she certifies the petition, it would be the first ATRC hearing in the court’s history, a proceeding that must invent its own procedures because it has no precedents to follow. If she declines, the administration must decide whether to refile with stronger documentation or route the case back through conventional channels after all.
What the July 16 filing establishes regardless of outcome is that the ATRC is now in play as a tool the administration is prepared to use. It has demonstrated willingness to file, located a case it believes meets the statutory threshold, and received a response from the court that was cautious but not hostile. Whether this becomes a one-off maneuver or the opening of a broader deportation track depends partly on what next week’s documentation review produces, and partly on what the administration takes from the court’s first reaction to being asked to actually work.
