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A federal judge said Wednesday that he will “likely” order the release of Prince Harry’s immigration files, which could reveal whether the Duke of Sussex was lawfully issued a US visa — or whether the royal could be subject to deportation for lying to authorities about his past drug use.
DC US District Court Judge Carl J. Nichols made the determination during a hearing for a case brought by lawyers at the conservative Heritage Foundation, who sued the Department of Homeland Security to compel the release of the 40-year-old’s records.
“To the maximum extent possible, I’m required to make public everything that can be made public,” Nichols told both parties, adding that he had to take care any disclosures do not violate US privacy laws shielding the Duke.
“I’m going to take this in stages,” Nichols added at the end of the hearing, indicating that he would allow the government to “submit proposed redactions” in order for him to “analyze” whether Harry properly attested to cocaine, cannabis and psychedelic mushrooms abuse, as detailed in his 2023 memoir “Spare.”
Attorney John Bardo had argued on behalf of the government that the duke’s records were “essentially the same” as sworn declarations by DHS officials already submitted into evidence and reviewed by the judge.
Those declarations led to Nichols’ ruling last September that “the public does not have a strong interest in disclosure of the duke’s immigration records.”
Even if information covered under privacy laws was removed, Bardo argued, the resulting file to be made public would be “a shell” and meaningless to Heritage attorneys who initiated the suit after filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the records.
But Nichols acknowledged that the case had been derailed due to procedural issues flagged by Heritage’s lawyers — including the fact that his September ruling was based on the DHS declarations, rather than on personal review of the immigration files.
“We can talk about how one goes about unringing that bell,” the judge said. “At a minimum, we’d have to go through that process.”
Heritage lawyer Samuel Dewey said he expected Nichols to first make public some of the secret visa records first received by the State Department and later submitted to DHS.
“I certainly think that some stuff can be disclosed and I don’t think it would necessarily just be a shell,” Dewey told The Post when asked about Bardo’s argument. “There is no expert you talk to who can figure out how the heck [Harry] is here without something having happened.”
Harry’s confession to drug abuse would have been required information to provide on non-immigrant visa application forms filed before he relocated to the US with wife Meghan Markle in 2020. The disclosures would have also required him to seek a waiver to gain entry into the US.
“If he came in, got a waiver, said, ‘Yes, I did all these drugs. Here’s the 10-page attachment to my form where I checked “yes,” detailing all my directives, got a waiver’ — those records would be in DHS. There would be DHS records adjudicating a waiver,” Dewey explained.
“It could have been a diplomatic visa from the State Department,” he added. “Or they just let him in … No different than if I walked across the Rio Grande, paroled you into the country, said, ‘You’re a gotaway. Go!’”
Heritage sued DHS last year insisting that Harry — who now resides in Montecito, Calif., with Markle and their two children — didn’t mention his history with drugs on his application forms filed before he quit royal life and left the UK.
The think tank has since publicly called on President Trump, who has the power to order federal agencies to release documents, to intervene.
Nile Gardiner, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, told reporters after the Wednesday court hearing that he had made Heritage’s views on the case “very clear to the new administration.”
“We have urged President Trump to release the records,” Gardiner said. “We believe the American public has has a right to know whether or not Prince Harry was truthful on his application and whether he received a kind of preferential treatment.”
“This is also an issue, I think, of ensuring that American immigration rule is firmly and fairly applied,” he added.
Trump, 78, has yet to publicly comment on the case since returning to the White House — but previously said on the campaign trail that he would consider deporting Harry.
Nichols had ruled last year that while Harry shared “intimate details of his life” in his book, he still had a “reasonable privacy interest” arguing against release of the documents.
In his memoir, Harry revealed that he tried cocaine when he was 17 years old “to feel different.”
“Of course I had been taking cocaine at that time,” he wrote in the book. “At someone’s house, during a hunting weekend, I was offered a line, and since then I had consumed some more.”
“I wouldn’t protect him. He betrayed the Queen. That’s unforgivable. He would be on his own if it was down to me,” Trump said in February 2024, referring to Harry’s departure from royal life during the late Queen Elizabeth II’s reign.
The following month, Trump added: “We’ll have to see if [DHS] know something about the drugs, and if he lied they’ll have to take appropriate action.”
