American Citizen Seeks Emergency Release From Turkish Detention, Alleging U.S. Custody

Counsel for Shawki Ahmad Omar, a naturalized American citizen and dual U.S.-Jordanian national, filed an emergency motion in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on or about July 1, 2025, seeking his immediate return to the United States [POLITICO]. Omar is being held at a deportation center in Turkey, but his lawyers argue that he is effectively being held in the "constructive custody" of the U.S. government. The petition alleges that the U.S. government worked with Turkish authorities to prevent Omar from re-entering the United States. The filing raises a threshold jurisdictional question that courts have addressed, and rejected, in earlier chapters of Omar's decades-long legal saga: whether a U.S. citizen detained abroad by or at the direction of American authorities may invoke federal habeas corpus jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 2241.

The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge John Bates, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush. The filing alleges that Turkish officials told Omar they were acting at the request of U.S. authorities. The complaint also includes correspondence with U.S. State Department officials acknowledging Omar's detention and stating that they were working with their Turkish counterparts to verify his status. Omar's counsel separately filed a habeas corpus petition on June 30, 2025, predating the emergency motion [POLITICO]. The administration has not commented publicly on the specific allegations in the petition [POLITICO].

U.S. military forces operating in Iraq arrested Omar, a dual American-Jordanian citizen, at his Baghdad home in late October 2004. Born in Kuwait, Omar became a naturalized American citizen following his marriage. Omar alleges that he traveled to Iraq in pursuit of reconstruction work following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime; the government, however, contends that Omar was an associate of insurgent Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and helped al-Zarqawi plan terrorist activities within and outside of Iraq. After his arrest, Omar and his wife were taken to the Camp Nama detention facility near Baghdad Airport, where they were held and allegedly subjected to torture. He was later held at Camp Bucca and Camp Cropper, facilities that gained infamy during the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal.

Omar's current filing is not his first attempt to invoke federal habeas jurisdiction arising from U.S. involvement in his detention. Omar's case reached the Supreme Court in 2008, in *Munaf v. Geren*, 553 U.S. 674. There, Omar argued that he was likely to be tortured if transferred to Iraqi authorities and that he had a due process right against such transfer. The Supreme Court unanimously rejected that argument, concluding that Omar did not have a habeas corpus or due process right to judicial second-guessing of the Executive's determination that he was not likely to be tortured in Iraqi custody. In July 2011, he lost a subsequent habeas case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which accepted U.S. government assurances that he would not be likely to be tortured if transferred to Iraqi custody; a week later, on July 15, 2011, he was handed over to Iraqi authorities. Brought before an Iraqi court in 2010 without legal representation, he was convicted of illegal entry; he maintains he entered the country lawfully but could not contest the claim because his passport had been confiscated when he was arrested. He was sentenced to 15 years, reduced to 7 years on appeal in 2011 by the Iraqi Supreme Court.

The current filing reframes the core legal theory. Rather than contesting a prospective transfer, as in *Munaf*, Omar's counsel now argues that Turkish officials are holding him at Washington's direction following his release from Iraqi custody this past April [POLITICO]. Omar's attorneys also argue that he faces "the risk of deportation to a country where he is likely to face torture, including Jordan," and that members of Omar's family have been questioned by authorities about his whereabouts and activities. That argument imports a non-refoulement dimension into the petition, implicating Article 3 of the Convention Against Torture and its domestic implementation under the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998. Omar previously raised FARR Act claims in his amended habeas petition before the D.C. Circuit, arguing that the statute gives him a right to judicial review of conditions in the receiving country before transfer. The D.C. Circuit held that the FARR Act, as supplemented by the Real ID Act of 2005, does not give military transferees such a right. Whether that precedent forecloses the current petition, which arises in a materially different procedural and factual posture, now falls to Judge Bates.

The broader policy context gives the filing additional weight. The Supreme Court's 2008 ruling in *Munaf* confirmed that U.S. citizens detained abroad by American forces can access federal habeas courts, but stopped short of requiring judicial oversight of transfer decisions. The current petition alleges that the U.S. government coordinated with Turkish authorities to prevent Omar from re-entering the United States. If the court accepts that characterization, it would expand the constructive-custody doctrine into an overseas immigration-enforcement context, a theory courts have not addressed in this specific configuration. The State Department's correspondence acknowledging Omar's detention, cited in the petition, may prove significant to that threshold inquiry: courts examining constructive custody have looked to whether U.S. officials exercised affirmative control over the detaining foreign authority, a factual dispute the government has so far declined to address on the merits [POLITICO].