U.S. President Donald Trump said Friday that his decision to leave a small number of U.S. troops in Syria did not constitute a reversal of his plan to withdraw all troops from the country.

“I am not reversing course,” Trump told reporters at the White House. 

“It’s a very small, tiny fraction of the people we have,” he said, referring to the more than 2,000 American troops in Syria who are supporting Kurdish forces fighting the last of the Islamic State group.

Administration officials said the United States would leave several hundred troops in Syria while the rest would be withdrawn. 

Preventing ‘resurging’

A senior U.S. defense official, using an acronym for Islamic State, told VOA that the troops would remain in Syria to help “enable local forces to keep ISIS from resurging.” The official said the presumption was that the several hundred troops would be part of an international peacekeeping force.

Trump said Friday, “We have had tremendous success in defeating the caliphate.” He added the United States “can leave a small force along with others … whether it’s NATO troops or whoever it might be, so that it [the caliphate] doesn’t start up again.”

In December, Trump, anticipating the defeat of IS in Syria, made a surprise announcement that all U.S. forces would be out of Syria by the end of April. In doing so, he confounded many of America’s European allies and angered some of his own allies in Washington.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of Trump’s closest allies on Capitol Hill, called it one of the “dumbest” ideas he’d heard. 

 

According to Graham, acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan agreed that a complete U.S. withdrawal from Syria could lead to a resurgence of Islamic State and a Turkish assault on Kurdish forces, and could give Iran an advantage inside Syria.

Reluctance among European leaders

European leaders have said they will be reluctant to fill the security gap when U.S. forces leave.

But Shanahan said U.S. allies had not rejected the idea of staying in Syria as an observer force.

He met Thursday at the Pentagon with a representative of one of the European allies, Belgian Defense Minister Didier Reynders, who said there had not been a blanket refusal from all U.S. allies to take part in a Syrian force.

“We are waiting for preparation of the withdrawal of U.S. troops and we are waiting now for more discussions about the way to prepare something,” Reynders said.

Shanahan told reporters Friday that “our mission remains unchanged in terms of the defeat of ISIS.” He said, “We’re working towards stabilization and to enhance the security capability of local security forces.” 

Phone call to Erdogan

Trump spoke by telephone Thursday with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The White House said they agreed to keep working on creating a “potential safe zone” inside Syria, which would keep Kurdish forces safe from possible a Turkish attack.

America’s Kurdish allies in Syria are concerned they would face Turkey’s wrath following a U.S. withdrawal.

Turkey says the Syrian troops are allied with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been fighting for greater Kurdish autonomy inside Turkey.   

Turkey regards the PKK as a terrorist group.

VOA’s Carla Babb at the Pentagon, Patsy Widakuswara at the White House and national security correspondent Jeff Seldin contributed to this report. 
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The father of an American-born woman who defected to the Islamic State terrorist group filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Trump administration because he wants his daughter to be allowed to return to the United States.

The Constitutional Law Center for Muslims in America (CLCMA) filed the complaint on behalf of Ahmed Ali Muthana, the father of Hoda Muthana and grandfather of her young son.

CLCMA said in a statement that the suit is “seeking declaratory relief recognizing (Hoda Muthana’s) citizenship, and injunctive relief requiring the United States to make good faith efforts to return her and her young son to the United States.”

The civil suit was filed, the statement said, “not to defend her from criminal prosecution, but instead seeking recognition of her United States citizenship, which prior to her departure was not in dispute and the citizenship of her young son.”

​Pompeo: She’s not a citizen

Earlier Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo contended that the woman is not a U.S. citizen and should not be allowed to return home from Syria because her father was a Yemeni diplomat.

President Donald Trump said he ordered Pompeo to not let Muthana return to the U.S., even though her lawyer says she is willing to face U.S. prosecution that she willingly went to Syria and used social media to praise the killings of Westerners.

“She may have been born here,” Pompeo told NBC’s “Today” show. “She is not a U.S. citizen, nor is she entitled to U.S. citizenship.”

He contended that the 24-year-old woman, now with a child born in a relationship with one of her three jihadist husbands, is not an American citizen because of her father’s diplomatic status.

Father not a diplomat

But Muthana’s lawyer told U.S. news outlets that the father had ended his diplomatic service “months and months” before his daughter was born in the eastern U.S. state of New Jersey in 1994, thus making her an American citizen.

The lawyer, Hassan Shibly, told CNN that Muthana “should have known better” than to leave her home in the southern state of Alabama in 2014 without her parents’ knowledge to head to Syria to embrace Islamic State.

Shibly said she immediately was locked up with 200 other women and told she would not be released unless she married one of the IS fighters.

Muthana posted on Twitter a picture of herself and three other women appearing to burn their Western passports, including an American one.

Now, however, with territory held by IS dwindling fast, Muthana has renounced extremism and wants to return home to confront any criminal charges that could be lodged against her.

“To say that I regret my past words, any pain that I caused my family, and any concerns I would cause my country would be hard for me to really express properly,” she said in a handwritten note to her lawyer.

Shibly said, “She wants to face our legal system.”

Standing in the way is Trump.

Right of citizenship

The CLCMA statement said, “Citizenship is a core right under the Constitution, and once recognized should not be able to be unilaterally revoked by tweet — no matter how egregious the intervening conduct may be.”

The U.S. normally grants citizenship to anyone that is “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, which would exclude the children of diplomats such as Muthana, if indeed Muthana’s father was a diplomat at the time of her birth.

Muthana’s lawyer said, “We cannot get to a point where we simply strip citizenship from those who break the law. That’s not what America is about. We have one of the greatest legal systems in the world, and we have to abide by it.”

Trump has attacked European allies that have not taken back hundreds of IS prisoners caught in Syria, where Trump plans to withdraw U.S. troops. By comparison, relatively few Americans have embraced radical Islam. The Counter Extremism Project at George Washington University has identified 64 Americans who joined IS in Syria or Iraq.

Europe is debating the nationality of some extremists. Britain recently revoked the citizenship of Shamina Begum, who like Muthana traveled to Syria and wants to return to her country of birth.

London asserted that because of her heritage she was entitled to Bangladeshi citizenship, but the Dhaka government Wednesday denied that she was eligible, leaving her effectively stateless.
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A U.S. judge Thursday appeared open to ordering the government to find potentially thousands of additional children separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border by the Trump administration, which could greatly expand the scope of a lawsuit challenging the separations.

U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego called a January report by an internal government watchdog that found the U.S. government had started implementing its policy of separating families months before it was announced “a very significant event.”

The Office of Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said in a report published earlier this year that the agency had identified many more children in addition to the 2,737 included as part of the class action lawsuit challenging family separations brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) last year. 

ACLU wants all families reunited

In response to the lawsuit, Sabraw ordered the families identified through a court process to be reunited with their children.

The ACLU has petitioned the judge to expand the class to force the government to do a full accounting of any additional separated children.

The premise of the class action lawsuit, Sabraw said, was the “overarching allegation of the unlawful separation” of families by the Trump administration.

“When there’s an allegation of wrong on this scale, one of the most fundamental obligations of law is to determine the scope of the wrong,” he said. “It is important to recognize we are talking about human beings.”

The administration of President Donald Trump implemented a “zero tolerance” policy to criminally prosecute and jail all illegal border crossers, even those traveling with their children, leading to a wave of separations last year. The policy sparked outrage when it became public, and the backlash led Trump to sign an executive order reversing course June 20, 2018.

In light of the Inspector General’s findings, as well as investigative reporting, Sabraw said, the current June 26, 2018, cut-off date for cases to be part of the lawsuit becomes “very arbitrary.”

‘Other galaxy of a task’

Department of Justice attorney Scott Stewart argued that the ACLU’s request to expand the class would blow the case into an “other galaxy of a task.” The government has argued in court papers that it is too labor intensive to find children who were separated and subsequently released to sponsors before the court order last year.

While most of the outrage last year focused on the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy, the government has continued to separate families on a smaller scale. 

In a filing Wednesday, the government said it had separated 245 children at the border between June 26, 2018, and Feb. 5, 2019. The government said 92 percent of these children were separated because of “parent criminality, prosecution, gang affiliation, or other law enforcement purpose.” 

Advocates say there is little transparency about the criteria and evidence used to justify ongoing separations.
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Claims of jury misconduct in the trial of drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman have drawn new attention to the digital-age challenge courts face in preventing jurors from scouring media accounts or conducting their own research before rendering a verdict. It’s a phenomenon that has been called the “Googling juror.” 

 

“Everyone has the world at his fingertips,” said Guzman attorney Jeffrey Lichtman. “Twenty years ago, you didn’t have to worry about that.” 

 

Lichtman told The Associated Press on Thursday that there are now serious questions surrounding Guzman’s conviction this month on drug-smuggling and conspiracy charges, and that he plans to ask U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan to bring in all 12 jurors and six alternates to question them about reports that several flouted admonitions to avoid media accounts of the case. 

One juror anonymously told VICE News this week that at least five members of the panel had followed media reports and Twitter feeds during the three-month-long trial and were aware of explosive — and potentially prejudicial — material that had been excluded from the proceedings. 

“It’s clear we have to get them back into court and get some answers about some massive misconduct,” Lichtman said.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn declined to comment Thursday.

New trial?

In some cases, similar jury shenanigans have been deemed prejudicial enough to warrant a new trial, a possibility experts say can’t be ruled out in Guzman’s case. 

 

“This is a question about fundamental fairness,” said former federal prosecutor Duncan Levin. “It’s presumptively prejudicial for a juror to have this information, and it’s a step more outrageous for them to have accessed it when the judge specifically told them not to.” 

 

Shy of sequestering jurors, stripping them of their electronics and repeatedly warning them, judges are limited in the steps they can take to prevent outside sources of information from infecting deliberations.  

  

“The jury system depends on people being honest in what they say and what they do,” said Rock Harmon, a former prosecutor in Alameda County, Calif. “There’s just no way to prevent this except to stress what they need to do.”    

In Guzman’s case, the anonymous jurors were not sequestered but were escorted by U.S. marshals to court, where they were required to give up their phones. They were allowed access to their devices at any other time, though the judge gave them a standard instruction each day not to view news or social media about the case. 

 

Still, the juror who spoke with VICE News said five jurors involved in the deliberations and two alternates had heard about child rape allegations that had been made against Guzman and covered by the news media but not admitted into the trial. The juror also described an instance in which a juror used a smartwatch to look up a news story just moments after Cogan met with them privately to ask them whether they had been exposed to any recent media coverage. 

 

“This is a growing phenomenon, and courts are struggling with how to address it,” said Thaddeus Hoffmeister, a University of Dayton law professor whose research has focused on juries. “You’re dealing with people today who have more faith in Google than the witnesses being called to testify.” 

Uphold oath or pay the price

 

The best remedy, Levin said, is for jurors to uphold their oath or face repercussions. In Guzman’s case, he said, if they acknowledge having disregarded Cogan’s instructions, they should be held in contempt of court. 

 

But convincing Cogan that the misconduct was real and that it is enough to order a new trial is a long shot, said former federal prosecutor Michael J. Stern. 

 

“The judge will have to decide whether there was a reasonable possibility that the information could have affected the jury’s verdict,” Stein said. 

 

Either way, Lichtman said, the revelations surrounding the panel that convicted his client are “sad and distressing.” 

 

Guzman, who is facing a mandatory life sentence, “is going to die in jail,” he said. “That’s why I repeatedly asked the jury to just give him a fair trial. It turns out that was too much to ask.” 
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