Biography
Rasmea Odeh is a Palestinian community organizer who worked with Arab women in the Chicago area. Israeli authorities arrested her in 1969, and a military court convicted her in 1970 of involvement in two Jerusalem bombings, including a supermarket attack that killed two people. Odeh maintained that her confession had been obtained through torture. She spent approximately ten years in Israeli prison before her release in a 1979 prisoner exchange.
After immigrating to the United States, Odeh became a U.S. citizen in 2004. Federal authorities arrested her in 2013 for failing to disclose her Israeli arrest, conviction and imprisonment on immigration and naturalization documents. A jury convicted her in 2014, but an appeals court vacated that conviction in 2016 and ordered further consideration of proposed expert testimony about the effects of her alleged torture and post-traumatic stress disorder. In April 2017, she pleaded guilty to unlawfully obtaining citizenship, admitting that she had knowingly concealed her criminal history. Her citizenship was revoked, and she was deported to Jordan in September 2017. Her supporters regarded the prosecution as political targeting of a Palestinian organizer; prosecutors maintained that it concerned deliberate immigration fraud.
Sources: Center for Constitutional Rights, February 25, 2016, https://ccrjustice.org/home/press-center/press-releases/court-vacates-conviction-palestinian-american-community-leader ; U.S. Department of Justice, August 17, 2017, https://www.justice.gov/usao-edmi/pr/individual-convicted-overseas-being-terrorist-who-participated-1969-british-consulate-0 ; The Chicago Reporter, https://www.chicagoreporter.com/rasmea-odeh-deported-but-not-defeated/
