Donald Trump has become the first president to invoke the Patriot Act in order to detain a man behind bars indefinitely - despite the fact he completed the duration of his criminal sentence and should've been released nearly three-years-ago.
Since the war of terror was officially declared 18-years-ago, Adham Amin Hassoun, who is now in his late 50s, has spent the near-majority of his time behind bars, having first been arrested on a immigration violation in June 2002.
Hassoun stood trial alongside once-suspected 'dirty bomber' Jose Padilla, though the crimes he was specifically accused of were not for acts or plots of violence - he was found guilty of cutting checks to extremist-linked Muslim charities outlawed by Congress after the 9/11 attacks.
All of Hassoun's checks but one were written before the devastation of September 11. He was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison, and was scheduled to be released in 2017.
However, Hassoun remains under the detention of ICE officials in New York after the Trump administration enacted Section 412 of the Patriot Act - for this first time in history - citing him as a continued threat to national security.
ICE officials wanted to deport Hassoun from the country after his criminal sentence concluded in 2017, however his statelessness as a Palestinian prevent such a motion. Neither his birth-country of Lebanon nor the Israel that occupies the West Bank and Gaza were willing to supply him refuge.
Backed by a team of attorneys from the University of Buffalo Law School, in January Hassoun won a legal battle that should have led to his freedom, on the grounds that his deportation was unlikely.
However, the Trump administration instead declared him as a threat to national security, first using an obscure immigration regulation designed to circumvent a 2001 Supreme Court ruling allowing for no more than six months detention.
The move was said to be aided by sealed testimony outlining Hassoun's alleged misdeeds behind bars by what his attorney's say were issued by other inmates offering second and third-hand accounts of his purported wrongful conduct to authorities.
Wait, didn’t the democrats just vote to extend/re-authorize the patriot act? Wtf did they think was going to happen?