An Afghan family living in Fort Worth, Texas allegedly plotted to massacre American voters on Election Day 2024 in the name of ISIS.
The son and son-in-law already pleaded guilty. Now the Justice Department is going after the woman accused of being the one who started all of it.
And the Trump administration just dusted off a court that has sat completely dormant for three decades to make sure she gets thrown out of this country for good.
The Court That Congress Built and Nobody Used
The Alien Terrorist Removal Court was established in 1996 but had never received a petition until this month, when the Justice Department filed an application seeking Nazira’s removal.
The court was created by Congress in 1996 and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, set up to deport noncitizens who could not be removed by the traditional legal process because the information about their cases was classified and could not be made public for national security reasons.
Think about that for a second. Thirty years. Bipartisan support when it was created. Signed by a Democrat President. And not a single administration — not Clinton, not Bush after September 11, not Obama, not Biden — ever actually used it.
The Justice Department considered roughly 100 possible cases by 2000 and rejected all of them, according to a 9/11 Commission staff report, finding that ordinary immigration charges were sufficient.
The targets of noncitizen terrorist removal proceedings — including legal permanent residents — are not permitted to review the classified evidence against them, and unlike criminal proceedings, they are barred from legally challenging how the evidence was collected by the government.
The Trump DOJ decided this case was different enough to finally flip the switch.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche put it plainly: “The allegations in this case show the matriarch of an ISIS-sympathizing family aiding in a plot to launch a mass casualty attack on American voters on Election Day.”
What the Family Was Allegedly Planning
Nazira Haji Zada, the 47-year-old matriarch of an Afghan family located in Fort Worth, Texas, allegedly played a role in schemes to perpetrate a mass shooting on Election Day in 2024, according to the DOJ press release.
Her son, Abdullah Haji Zada, and her son-in-law, Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, were previously convicted for their roles in the ISIS-inspired plot.
Tawhedi and Abdullah Haji Zada were arrested in October 2024, after purchasing the firearms and ammunition to be used in the Election Day attack from an undercover FBI employee.
Tawhedi admitted to buying two AK-47 rifles, 500 rounds of ammunition, and 10 magazines for the planned mass-casualty attack. The 28-year-old also asked an ISIS facilitator whether 500 rounds would be enough for the shooting, according to a criminal complaint affidavit cited by the release.
The 17-year-old Abdullah Haji Zada pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Tawhedi pleaded guilty in June 2025 to two terrorism-related crimes, including conspiring to provide resources to ISIS.
But the government’s case against the mother goes deeper than just her family connection to the convicted men.
The FBI alleged she “pledged loyalty to ISIS” and “worked to indoctrinate her children with ISIS ideology,” citing information from a “reliable source.” According to the DOJ, “Nazira worked with Tawhedi to radicalize the family and to conceal their pro-ISIS teaching and planned family relocation to ISIS-controlled territory from her unsuspecting husband.”
Nazira signed a contract to sell their home and bought “one-way airfare” for her to fly with her remaining children to Kabul, Afghanistan, before the alleged Election Day plot was to be carried out, the government said.
She wasn’t just a bystander. The government’s position is that she was the ideological engine behind the whole thing.
The Hearing and What Comes Next
Nazira Haji Zada was arrested in late July and stood before the ATRC’s Chief Judge Joan N Ericksen in Washington, DC. Ericksen ordered that the government’s application to the ATRC be accepted, citing “probable cause to believe that the Respondent has been correctly identified and is an alien terrorist present in the United States.” She also denied Nazira Haji Zada’s attorney his request that the case be dismissed at the hearing, according to the AP.
FBI Director Kash Patel called the proceedings “a historic step” in a DOJ statement.
Blanche added: “Congress created the Alien Terrorist Removal Court three decades ago to remove from the United States alien terrorists who never should have been here in the first place.”
Her defense lawyers came in swinging. Defense attorney Matthew Farley told the court: “This entire scheme is in violation of due process and unconstitutional.”
Farley said the case represents “a runaround to bringing a criminal case” because it relies on a lower evidentiary standard to prove whether she is a non-citizen terrorist who can be deported under the law.
Haji Zada has not been charged with any crimes, court documents show, but her son and son-in-law pleaded guilty to related charges last year.
The court’s lack of prior cases was evident as the judge, prosecutors, and defense lawyers spent part of the proceeding resolving basic procedural questions, including how documents would be handled and who could access classified evidence.
A date has not yet been set for Haji Zada’s removal hearing.
The Bigger Picture Nobody in Washington Wants to Say Out Loud
This family came to the United States as lawful permanent residents. They were welcomed in. And according to federal prosecutors, they spent that time pledging loyalty to a terrorist organization that murders civilians, stockpiling weapons, planning a mass shooting at American polling places, and preparing to flee the country the moment the bodies dropped.
That is not a failure of vetting at the margins. That is a catastrophic breakdown in the entire premise that importing people from regions with deep-rooted jihadist movements carries no security cost to the American people.
The Biden administration let the border collapse. It also presided over the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of Afghans after the chaotic 2021 withdrawal — a process that, by the administration’s own admission, moved so fast that proper background checks were not always completed. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security flagged concerns about vetting gaps at the time. Those concerns were largely dismissed as inconvenient.
And now a court that sat unused for 30 years is hearing its first case involving an Afghan family that allegedly planned to murder American voters in the name of ISIS.
The left’s lawyers will argue due process. They will say the classified evidence standard is unfair. They will file motions and hold press conferences and frame Nazira Haji Zada as a victim of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. That’s the playbook, and it never changes.
But the facts that are already public — the guns, the ammunition, the one-way tickets to Kabul, the son sentenced to 15 years, the son-in-law who pleaded guilty to conspiring with ISIS — those facts don’t require classified evidence to understand. The picture they paint is not ambiguous.
The Trump DOJ made a deliberate choice to use this court rather than pursue deportation through standard immigration channels. The FBI explained why in a July 15 memo: “The underlying information is classified because disclosure would enable terrorists and terrorist organizations to avoid preventative or detection measures or would reveal FBI or other US Intelligence Community sources.”
In other words, there is apparently more to this story than what has already been made public. And the government believes that information is serious enough to warrant a court proceeding that has never been attempted in three decades of existence.
The constitutional questions around the ATRC are real and will get litigated. But the political question is simpler: how many more cases like this are sitting in FBI files right now, waiting to be discovered, involving people who were waved into this country under the promise that they just wanted a better life?
The Trump administration is at least asking that question. The previous one wasn’t.
Sources: US Department of Justice press release; Daily Caller; Fox News; CBS News; ABC News; NBC News; The Jerusalem Post; US DOJ Western District of Oklahoma
