The case of the jihadi bride: How the US government fails to safeguard our citizenship

leekris/Getty Images

The New York Times is lamenting how the State Department is not letting a “jihadi bride” back into the U.S. now that she is on the losing side of her treason. But there is another point that everyone is missing from the case of Hoda Muthana: What is government doing to ensure that children of diplomats are not automatically, illegally granted citizenship?

Hoda Muthana is the daughter of one of the many millions of Middle Eastern immigrants we’ve admitted in recent decades who have developed radical jihadist views. She left this country in 2014, married a total of three ISIS fighters (her first two husbands were killed) and even posted a video of burning her U.S. passport. She tweeted messages calling for spilling the blood of veterans on Memorial Day. Now that the caliphate collapsed, she is begging to come back in and is claiming she has changed her views.

Why are children of diplomats being granted American citizen documents?

The presumption in the media when the case first broke was that she was a traditional American citizen, being born in the U.S. to legal permanent resident parents. But the State Department is contending that she was never a legitimate American citizen because she was born to a Yemeni diplomat to the U.N. living here on a special diplomatic visa, such as a G-2 visa.

While the details of this particular case are still murky, it raises a general concern about the thousands of kids born on our soil to diplomats of all stripes from all regions in the world. Even according to those who hold the misguided view that birthright citizenship is not only in the 14th Amendment but applies to people who violate our sovereignty and reside here without permission, that does not extend to children of diplomats. There is no dispute about that. Yet, as the Center for Immigration Studies reported several years ago, the government has been so lax in enforcing this that “children born to foreign diplomats on U.S. soil [are] receiving U.S. birth certificates and Social Security numbers (SSNs) — effectively becoming U.S. citizens.”

Read the rest of the story HERE.

If you like what you see, please "Like" us on Facebook either here or here. Please follow us on Twitter here.