In 1996, Congress created a federal court with one job: deport alien terrorists from the United States. It's called the Alien Terrorist Removal Court. It has existed for 30 years. No president — not Clinton, who literally created the court, not Bush after 9/11, not Obama, not Biden — ever activated it.
Until now.
The Trump administration has fired up the Alien Terrorist Removal Court for the first time in its three-decade existence, and CNN broke the story with the kind of breathless alarm you'd expect from a network that treats border enforcement like a civil rights violation. They described it as a "little-known court tasked with handling highly sensitive deportation cases against alleged alien terrorists" that "has lain dormant since its 1996 creation."
Note the framing. Not "finally used." Not "long-overdue activation." The word CNN went with in their headline was "secretive." A court created by an act of Congress — publicly, through the democratic process, with a floor vote and a presidential signature — is apparently "secretive" because nobody in the last 30 years bothered to turn the lights on.
Sneed's report emphasized that the court "gives the government enormous latitude to keep secret — including from the person it is trying to deport — its reasons for believing an immigrant is a terrorist." Which sounds ominous until you remember that classified intelligence sources and methods are, by definition, classified. That's not a design flaw. That's the entire reason the court exists — so you can use intelligence to remove terrorists without burning the sources that identified them.
The court was so unused it didn't even have a website for tracking proceedings. Thirty years of collecting dust while four administrations — including one that oversaw the worst terrorist attack in American history — decided it wasn't worth the paperwork.
Attorney Andrew Branca spotted an angle CNN probably didn't intend to highlight. The Alien Terrorist Removal Court's chief judge is Jeb Boasberg — the same federal judge who has repeatedly clashed with the Trump administration on immigration enforcement. Branca called the activation "political jiu-jitsu on Boasberg. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy." Now Boasberg, who has positioned himself as a judicial check on Trump's deportation agenda, gets to preside over a court specifically designed to expedite the removal of foreign terrorists.
Left-wing legal groups are already raising "due process" concerns. Which is an interesting objection to raise about an Article III court created by Congress with Senate-confirmed judges and a full appellate path. The due process is built into the structure. What they actually object to is the outcome — that terrorists might get deported efficiently instead of spending a decade grinding through immigration courts.
The broader question isn't whether Trump should have activated the court. It's why nobody else did. We had 30 years, multiple mass-casualty attacks on American soil, and an entire bureaucracy dedicated to counterterrorism. Congress handed every president since Clinton a ready-made tool for removing alien terrorists through a judicial process. Four administrations looked at it, shrugged, and let it sit.
The court that Congress built to protect Americans from foreign terrorists finally has a case on its docket. The only "secret" was that the government had this option the whole time and chose not to use it.
