The US Supreme Court has refused to hear the appeal of an American woman, Hoda Muthana who joined the Islamic State (IS) terror group but is seeking re-entry to the US after saying she regrets her actions.
Hoda Muthana grew up in Alabama, and travelled to Syria to join ISIS in 2014.
While she was abroad, the CIA and FBI say Muthana, now 27, was not a US citizen and revoked her passport.
But in 2019, Muthana’s father, a Yemeni diplomat appealed against a federal court that barred her entry back into the US. On Wednesday, January 12, the US Supreme Court declined the case without comment.
Muthana was born in the US. But under US federal law, the children of diplomats born in the US are not automatically bestowed citizenship unlike normal citizens or people living in the US who give birth in the country.
In his lawsuit, Ahmed Ali Muthana argued his family had given up diplomatic status before his daughter was born, making her a citizen. They maintained Ms Muthana was previously recognised as a citizen by the US State Department and given a US passport in 2004.
In a statement to CNN in 2019, Muthana said she was a “naive, angry and arrogant young woman” when she left the US for Syria.
In order to go to Syria, she withdrew from college and used her tuition money to purchase a flight to Turkey without her family’s knowledge, she said.
Social media posts during her time with the extremist group show Muthana applauding terrorist attacks by ISIS and encouraging other Americans to join the terror group.
“There are soooo many Aussies and Brits here but where are the Americans, wake up u cowards,” she wrote on Twitter in a post obtained by the New York Times.
She has since said she deeply regrets joining IS and apologised for the posts promoting the group. She now has a toddler son, with a man she met while living with the group. The father has since died.
When asked on Wednesday why her appeal case was rejected , the Supreme court declined to comment .
