Prince Harry loses case with which he sought to hire private security 0:43
(WABNEWS) Prince Harry’s immigration files must be declassified in light of the revelations about drug use made in his recent book, a group of conservative think tanks will argue in federal court next week.
The Heritage Foundation has sued the US government to find out if it acted in accordance with procedure when it granted the US visa to the Duke of Sussex. Under US immigration law, evidence of past drug use may be grounds for denying an application.
RELATED
The case will be brought before a federal judge on June 6 in the US District Court for the District of Columbia.
The organization filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, seeking to force the government to make Harry’s immigration file public. “The information requested is in the immense public interest,” read an amended complaint filed May 5.
“Continued extensive media coverage has brought to light the question of whether DHS (Department of Homeland Security) properly admitted the Duke of Sussex in light of the fact that he has admitted publicly a series of drug offenses both in the United States and abroad,” he continues.
The original request for Harry’s records was denied because Harry had not indicated that he “consented to the release of his information,” the US Department of Justice said in court documents.
In addition, the DHS argues that “citations to speculation about the status of Prince Harry’s visa are not sufficient to meet the standard” of expediting the publication process of the document.
The Heritage Foundation has long been one of the most influential conservative think tanks in Washington. Nile Gardiner, director of the foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, tweeted Thursday that there was public interest in releasing Harry’s background.
“Given your wide admission of drug use, normally disqualifying for entry into the United States, the American people deserve answers to the serious questions posed by the tests,” he wrote in a Twitter message. “Did DHS in fact look the other way, play favorites, or fail to respond adequately to any possible false statements from Prince Harry?”
WABNEWS asked a representative for Prince Harry for comment.
Harry recently confessed to taking various recreational drugs at parties in his explosive memoir “Spare,” published in January.
The Duke of Sussex has admitted to using cocaine, smoking marijuana and trying hallucinogenic mushrooms. Harry, who moved to California with Meghan in 2020, has opened up about his experiences with cocaine as a teenager.
“Of course. I had been doing cocaine around that time. At someone’s country house, during a shooting weekend, I had been offered a line, and I’ve had a few more since then,” Harry revealed.
“It wasn’t much fun, and it didn’t make me particularly happy, like it seemed to make everyone around me, but it made me feel different, and that was the whole point.”
Harry described himself as a “deeply unhappy seventeen-year-old boy willing to try almost anything to upset the status quo”.
Elsewhere in the autobiography, the fifth-in-line to the throne talks about his switch from smoking tobacco to smoking pot during his days at Eton College, as well as revealing that he tried magic mushrooms during a trip to the United States.
Harry recounted staying briefly at actress Courteney Cox’s home, where “we saw a huge box of black diamond mushroom chocolates” and he and a friend ate several and “washed them all down with tequila”.
The autobiography was not the first time Prince Harry has spoken about his recreational drug use when he was younger.
She previously spoke with Oprah Winfrey about how she abused drugs and alcohol in her late 20s and early 30s as a coping mechanism with the pressures of real life.
“I was willing to drink, I was willing to take drugs,” he said. “I was willing to try to do the things that made me feel less like I did back then.”
