It’s no secret that U.S. President Donald Trump isn’t the biggest fan of Prince Harry, but could the change in presidential power lead to the prince’s deportation from the United States?
The Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025, the presidency blueprint that Trump has been heavily mirroring in the early weeks of his second term, has been pushing to know more about the prince’s immigration status and records ever since the royal admitted to using drugs in the past in his memoir, Spare.
The think tank wants Harry’s immigration paperwork released, arguing there’s a possibility the Duke of Sussex lied on his forms about his past drug use or received special treatment from Joe Biden’s administration to enter the U.S. They want to know so badly, in fact, that they sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) after it rejected the Heritage Foundation’s Freedom of Information Act request to release Harry’s record.
The prince is not a party in the lawsuit.
In September of last year the case was seemingly closed when a judge ruled that the application would remain private, citing a “legitimate privacy interest in his immigration status.”
FILE – Prince Harry, Joe Biden and Jill Biden cheer on the teams as the USA compete against the Netherlands in the Wheelchair Basketball Finals during the Invictus Games 2017 at Mattamy Athletic Centre on Sept. 30, 2017 in Toronto, Canada.
Chris Jackson/Getty Images for the Invictus Games Foundation
Now, however, a federal judge is considering next steps in the case, and at a hearing on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols focused largely on how to handle a trio of sworn statements from DHS officials on why the agency was fighting the records request.
Those statements have not been seen by the Heritage legal team, and Nichols is considering whether to release part or all of those declarations to the Heritage Foundation. The judge — who has been shown some, but not all, of Harry’s immigration records — said he’s also considering whether to request more records from the government and whether to call in an outside expert as a consultant.
The Heritage Foundation has argued that releasing the paperwork is “of immense public interest,” pointing to Harry’s revelations in Spare, where he detailed past recreational use of cocaine, cannabis and psychedelic mushrooms.
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Application forms for U.S. visas specifically ask about current and past drug use and admitting this can lead to applications being rejected.
And while U.S. immigration offers make their final decisions on admissibility on a number of factors, the think tank argues that admitting past drug use “generally renders such a person inadmissible for entry.”
“If he lied, that gets you deported,” Heritage’s lawyer Samuel Dewey told reporters after Wednesday’s hearing. “People are routinely deported for lying on immigration forms.”
FILE – Copies of “Spare” are displayed at Sherman’s book store in Freeport, Maine, Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2023.
Robert F. Bukaty / The Associated Press
Dewey said it’s also possible that Harry was truthful about his prior drug use on his application, and received either an internal DHS waiver or some sort of diplomatic visa from the State Department. Both options are legal but would leave the government and Harry open to accusations of special treatment.
Nichols said he’s seeking to strike a balance between revealing too much information in the DHS statements and redacting them to the point of meaninglessness.
“There’s a point where redactions would leave just a name or a date,” he said.
In the past, Trump has had choice words for the prince and his wife, Meghan Markle, going back to 2016 when Markle branded the then-new president a “misogynist” and “divisive” during an interview with Larry Wilmore. The interview took place two months before Markle met her future husband and long before she married into the Royal Family.
Years later, in 2019, before a presidential visit to the U.K., Trump dismissed her comments, saying: “I didn’t know she was nasty.” A year later, he said “I’m not a fan of her. I wish a lot of luck to Harry, he’s going to need it.”
When the next election rolled around, as Trump faced off against Biden, Harry appeared in a video, urging people not only to vote but to also “reject hate speech, misinformation, and online negativity” — words that many took to be a thinly veiled swipe at Trump.
Last year, before he was elected, Trump told Express U.S. tabloid that he would not “protect” Harry.
“I wouldn’t protect him. He betrayed the Queen. That’s unforgivable. He would be on his own if it was down to me.”
— With files from The Associated Press
