July, 18 2013, 01:09pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Josh Bell, ACLU, 212-549-2666, media@aclu.org
Jen Nessel, CCR, 212-614-6449, jnessel@ccrjustice.org
Court Hearing Friday in Lawsuit Challenging US Drone Killings of Three Americans
ACLU and CCR Argue Killings Must Be Subject to Judicial Review
WASHINGTON
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights will be in federal court Friday for oral argument in their lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the U.S. government's killing of three U.S. citizens in Yemen in 2011: Anwar Al-Aulaqi and Samir Khan in September and Al-Aulaqi's 16-year-old son Abdulrahman the following month. The groups argue that the killings violated the Fifth Amendment's guarantee of due process, and that courts have a crucial role to play in judging the legality of the government's actions.
"The Constitution does not allow government officials to kill Americans based on vague and shifting legal criteria and evidence never presented to a court," said ACLU National Security Project Director Hina Shamsi, who will argue in court Friday. "The government has argued that the court should step aside when the executive branch conducts extrajudicial killings of American citizens abroad, but the Supreme Court has ruled that the judiciary has an essential role to play in protecting civil liberties even in the context of actual military conflict. The Constitution's protections are never more crucial than when the government seeks to deprive people of their lives."
The lawsuit was filed one year ago today on behalf of Nasser Al-Aulaqi, the father and grandfather of Anwar and Abdulrahman Al-Aulaqi, and Sarah Khan, the mother of Samir Khan.
"The government's position is unprecedented and extraordinary. It claims the most consequential power a government can exercise against its own citizens - the power to take life without due process - and asserts that the courts should have no role at all in reviewing its actions, even after the fact, even when the killings are off any battlefield," said CCR Senior Staff Attorney Pardiss Kebriaei, who will also argue in court Friday. "The court should exercise its constitutionally mandated role and review our clients' fundamental claims. It is for the court to determine the legality of the government's actions, not for the government simply to assert it."
The Justice Department has filed briefs seeking to dismiss the case, arguing that "political questions" and national security issues bar judicial review.
In 2010, following press reports that the U.S. government had put Anwar Al-Aulaqi on a "kill list," the ACLU and CCR filed a lawsuit representing Nasser Al-Aulaqi challenging the government's authority to do so. The court dismissed that suit on the grounds that Nasser Al-Aulaqi did not have legal standing to challenge the targeting of his son, and that the request for before-the-fact judicial review raised non-justiciable "political questions." The current lawsuit raises different legal questions because it was filed after the killings had taken place.
WHAT:
Oral argument in Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta on the government's motion to dismiss in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
WHO:
ACLU National Security Project Director Hina Shamsi and CCR Senior Staff Attorney Pardiss Kebriaei will argue before Judge Rosemary M. Collyer.
WHEN:
Friday, July 19, 10 a.m.
WHERE:
E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse
Courtroom 8
333 Constitution Ave., NW
Washington, D.C.
More information and legal filings are at:
ccrjustice.org/ourcases/current-cases/al-aulaqi-v.-panetta
and:
aclu.org/national-security/al-aulaqi-v-panetta
A video of Nasser Al-Aulaqi talking about the case is at:
youtu.be/GQlbnulmnEw
This release is available at:
aclu.org/national-security/court-hearing-friday-lawsuit-challenging-us-drone-killings-three-americans
The American Civil Liberties Union was founded in 1920 and is our nation's guardian of liberty. The ACLU works in the courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.
(212) 549-2666LATEST NEWS
Princeton Experts Speak Out Against Trump Boat Strikes as 'Illegal' and Destabilizing 'Murders'
"Deploying an aircraft carrier and US Southern Command assets to destroy small yolas and wooden boats is not only unlawful, it is an absurd escalation," said one scholar.
Dec 10, 2025
Multiple scholars at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs on Wednesday spoke out against the Trump administration's campaign of bombing suspected drug boats, with one going so far as to call them acts of murder.
Eduardo Bhatia, a visiting professor and lecturer in public and international affairs at Princeton, argued that it was "unequivocal" that the attacks on on purported drug boats are illegal.
"They violate established maritime law requiring interdiction and arrest before the use of lethal force, and they represent a grossly disproportionate response by the US," stressed Bhatia, the former president of the Senate of Puerto Rico. "Deploying an aircraft carrier and US Southern Command assets to destroy small yolas and wooden boats is not only unlawful, it is an absurd escalation that undermines regional security and diplomatic stability."
Deborah Pearlstein, director of the Program in Law and Public Policy at Princeton, said that she has been talking with "military operations lawyers, international law experts, national security legal scholars," and other experts, and so far has found none who believe the administration's boat attacks are legal.
Pearlstein added that the illegal strikes are "a symptom of the much deeper problem created by the purging of career lawyers on the front end, and the tacit promise of presidential pardons on the back end," the result of which is that "the rule of law loses its deterrent effect."
Visiting professor Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, argued that it was not right to describe the administration's actions as war crimes given that a war, by definition, "requires a level of sustained hostilities between two organized forces that is not present with the drug cartels."
Rather, Roth believes that the administration's policy should be classified as straight-up murder.
"These killings are still murders," he emphasized. "Drug trafficking is a serious crime, but the appropriate response is to interdict the boats and arrest the occupants for prosecution. The rules governing law enforcement prohibit lethal force except as a last resort to stop an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury, which the boats do not present."
International affairs professor Jacob N. Shapiro pointed to the past failures in the US "War on Drugs," and predicted more of the same from Trump's boat-bombing spree.
"In 1986, President Ronald Reagan announced the 'War on Drugs,' which included using the Coast Guard and military to essentially shut down shipment through the Caribbean," Shapiro noted. "The goal was to reduce supply, raise prices, and thereby lower use. Cocaine prices in the US dropped precipitously from 1986 through 1989, and then dropped slowly through 2006. Traffickers moved from air and sea to land routes. That policy did not work, it's unclear why this time will be different."
The scholars' denunciation of the boat strikes came on the same day that the US seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela in yet another escalatory act of aggression intended to put further economic pressure on the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Pentagon Weighed Sending Boat Strike Survivors to Salvadoran Prison to Avoid Defending Bombings in Court
One former Navy lawyer said the Trump administration "might not want to get into the messy issues involving detention and habeas corpus lawsuits.”
Dec 10, 2025
Pentagon officials asked about sending survivors of US boat strikes in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean to a notorious maximum security prison in El Salvador in a bid to keep them out of American courts—where the Trump administration's high seas extrajudicial killing spree would be subject to legal scrutiny.
New details published Tuesday by the New York Times revealed that attorneys at the US Department of Defense inquired about whether two survivors of an October 16 strike on a boat allegedly smuggling drugs in the southern Caribbean could be sent to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), where the Trump administration has shipped ihundreds of mostly Venezuelan victims of its mass deportation campaign.
The prison—the centerpiece of right-wing Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s war on crime—has been plagued by allegations of torture and other abuse.
One Trump administration official speaking on condition of anonymity told the Times that State Department lawyers were "stunned" by the query. The two boat strike survivors were ultimately returned to Colombia and Ecuador, their home countries.
Other unnamed officials told the newspaper that repatriations—either to survivors' home countries or to third nations—would become the administration's default plan for dealing with anyone who lived through the US attacks.
The goal, the officials said, was to avoid trying boat strike survivors in US courts, where the discovery process would compel the Trump administration—which has offered no concrete evidence to support its claims that the targeted vessels were carrying drugs—to provide legal justification for attacks that experts say are illegal.
The Pentagon's inquiry followed a September 2 "double-tap" strike on a vessel carrying 11 passengers. Two men survived the initial bombing but were killed in a second strike. Since then, at least 76 other people have been killed in 23 boat strikes reported by the Trump administration.
In addition to the two men who initially survived the September 2 strike and the two repatriated survivors of the October 16 attack, one other person who lived through a boat bombing was left adrift at sea and is presumed dead.
Some observers have noted similarities between the Trump administration's goal of keeping boat strike survivors out of US courtrooms and War on Terror policies and practices—first implemented during the George W. Bush administration—such as extraordinary rendition, the use of Central Intelligence Agency "black sites," and imprisonment of terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba—designed to circumvent the law.
While the Trump administration previously sent migrants captured during its crackdown to Guantánamo, sending boat strike survivors to the lockup allow their lawyers to sue for habeas corpus, a right granted by the US Supreme Court in its 2008 Boumediene v. Bush decision.
The Trump administration has revived the term "unlawful enemy combatant"—which was used by the Bush administration to classify people caught up in the War on Terror in a way that skirts the law—to apply to boat strike survivors. The Pentagon has also called such survivors "distressed mariners," a term that normally applies to civilians stranded at sea.
“If we’re in a war, they should be using the term ‘shipwrecked survivors,’” Mark Nevitt, a former Navy lawyer who is now a law professor at Emory University, told the Times. “My theory is they might not want to get into the messy issues involving detention and habeas corpus lawsuits.”
Relatives of men killed in the strikes, as well as officials in Venezuela and Colombia, say that at least some of the victims were fishermen who were not linked to the illicit drug trade. One expert said last month that even in cases of vessels that were involved in drug trafficking, the bombings were "the equivalent of straight-up massacring 16-year-old drug dealers on US street corners.”
Even if the men targeted in the boat strikes were running drugs, "the appropriate response is to interdict the boats and arrest the occupants for prosecution," former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said Wednesday.
"The rules governing law enforcement prohibit lethal force except as a last resort to stop an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury," he added, "which the boats do not present."
Keep ReadingShow Less
New DHS Database Suggests That Less Than 5% of Those Arrested by ICE Are the ‘Worst of the Worst’
The database contains just 9,738 total people, a tiny fraction of the more than 220,000 ICE data says the agency arrested between January 21 and October 15.
Dec 10, 2025
In response to criticism of its aggressive and often lawless "mass deportation" campaign—which has entailed sweeping raids by masked agents, the use of squalid detention centers rife with torture, overt racial profiling, and the near-total abrogation of due process—the Trump administration has often fallen back on a familiar refrain: that the immigrants it targets are "the worst of the worst" dangerous criminals.
Immigration data published throughout the second Trump administration has already undermined this claim. Last month, David J. Bier of the Cato Institute published new data showing that between October 1 and November 15, only 5% of those booked into ICE detention had violent criminal convictions, while 73% had no convictions at all. It mirrored previous data published by Cato in June, which showed that 65% arrested had no criminal convictions of any kind, while 93% had no violent convictions.
Justice Department data published last month, meanwhile, showed that of the at least 614 people snatched up in the Operation Midway Blitz crackdown in Chicago, just 16 had criminal records of any kind.
On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security published its own "Worst of the Worst" database seeking to reverse the narrative, but it seems to have done the opposite.
"DHS has launched WOW.DHS.GOV for Americans to see the criminal illegal aliens that we are arresting, what crimes they committed, and what communities we removed them from," read a post from the agency on social media.
The post leads to a website containing the names, photos, and nationalities of those arrested by ICE. It also lists alleged past criminal convictions. In many cases, the only documentation of the allegations, if any is provided at all, is a DHS press release rather than official court records.
"Under Secretary [Kristi] Noem's leadership, the hardworking men and women of DHS and ICE are fulfilling President Trump's promise and carrying out mass deportations—starting with the worst of the worst—including the illegal aliens you see here," a header on the website reads.
Among those listed are people who DHS says have been convicted of heinous crimes, ranging from attempted murder to child abduction to domestic battery.
But the database contains just 9,738 total people, a tiny fraction of the more than 220,000 ICE data says the agency arrested between January 21 and October 15.
"So DHS is implicitly admitting that less than 5% of the people it arrests are people they believe are 'the worst of the worst,'" said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.
Moreover, even some of those listed among the "Worst of the Worst" have only nonviolent offenses to their name, like drug possession, shoplifting, or disorderly conduct.
Reichlin-Melnick also noted that while immigration law does not require a criminal conviction for a person to be removed, "it matters because the administration talks as if these cases are the majority."
"There are definitely bad people on there who deserve deportation, but plenty of others on the list have nothing worse than a misdemeanor," he said. “If the administration were to actually focus its resources on people who were serious public safety threats or fugitives, there would be less of an outcry. But data shows that the big focus has been on boosting numbers by going after people no previous administration, Republican or Democrat, prioritized.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular