What could possibly go wrong?
“Court: Ex-terror defendant facing deportation is US citizen,” by Larry Neumeister, Associated Press, September 13, 2018:
NEW YORK — A one-time Maryland high school honors student who admitted aiding Muslim extremists overseas and helped the U.S. pursue terrorists after his 2011 arrest is a U.S. citizen, a federal appeals panel said Thursday as it erased a pending deportation order.
The ruling by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan means 24-year-old Mohammad Hassan Khalid can continue his studies at a Maryland college.
His Philadelphia lawyer, Wayne Sachs, called the decision a “very satisfying victory for a well-deserving young man with a bright future.”
He said the three-judge appeals panel, unlike four earlier courts, “properly focused on the law rather than the petitioner’s ‘notoriety.'”
The U.S. government did not immediately say if it planned to appeal.
Circuit Judge Dennis Jacobs wrote that he cannot congratulate Khalid, given that he “plotted sneaking violence against Americans.”
“He cooperated with the authorities only when, having been caught, he found himself needing another kind of refuge,” Jacobs said.
Circuit Judge Christopher F. Droney, who wrote the main opinion, explained that Khalid was entitled to citizenship because he was under age 18 when his father gained citizenship….
Khalid entered the United States in 2007 with his family. He was born in the United Arab Emirates, but was a Pakistani citizen because his parents were Pakistani.
Khalid was 17 when he was arrested in 2011 after winning a full scholarship to prestigious Johns Hopkins University. Authorities said he had been engaging in radical Islamist chat rooms from his family’s small apartment near Baltimore since he was 15.
In 2012, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, admitting that he had agreed in his secret online life to raise money and recruit terrorists for jihad….