Prince Harry is set to learn his fate as a US resident as his visa records will come under scrutiny in the duke’s first court hearing under President Trump.
The Duke of Sussex scored a major legal victory in September after a judge ruled that his US visa will stay private after the Heritage Foundation tried to get his application released to prove whether or not he mentioned his past drug use.
Now, a federal judge has ordered Harry and the think tank to appear in court on Feb. 5 in Washington, DC. Judge Carl J Nichols set the hearing for 2 p.m., the Daily Mail reported.
It will mark the first court appearance since Trump’s return to the White House after the former working royal’s visa status was thrust into doubt following the release of his tell-all memoir, “Spare,” in 2023.
In a lawsuit last year, the conservative think tank sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for access to Harry’s visa documents to determine whether he made false statements about prior drug use.
Harry, 40, admitted in his 2023 memoir, “Spare,” that he experimented with cocaine, cannabis and psychedelic mushrooms — behavior he would have been required to disclose on application forms filed before he relocated to the US in 2020.
The Heritage Foundation insisted that Harry — who resides in Montecito, Calif., with wife Meghan 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 foundation argues that the duke must have either provided false information on his forms or received preferential treatment.
However, government attorneys argued that releasing the runaway royal’s documents would violate his privacy rights.
The Department of Homeland Security dismissed the foundation’s claims, saying that its “purported evidence of government wrongdoing amounted merely to a ‘bare suspicion’ of government misconduct.”
The Post reached out to the DHS and Harry’s reps for comment.
The think tank has since publicly called on the president to intervene.
Nile Gardiner, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, told The Post, “I’ll be urging the president to release Prince Harry’s immigration records and the president does have that legal authority to do that.”
“It’s important because this is an issue of the rule of law, transparency and accountability. No one should be above the law.”
“Donald Trump is ushering in a new era of strict border control enforcement, and you know, Prince Harry should be held fully to account as he has admitted to extensive illegal drug use,” he added. “My firm expectation is that action will be taken.”
In September’s ruling, Judge Nichols declared that “the public does not have a strong interest in disclosure of the duke’s immigration records.”
The judge acknowledged that Harry shared “intimate details of his life” in his book, but ruled that he had a “reasonable privacy interest” in his 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.”
President Trump has since been pressed to release the former working royal’s immigration file.
Ahead of his election win, the POTUS said he would consider deporting 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,” he said in Feb. 2024.
The following month, he added, “We’ll have to see if [DHS] know something about the drugs, and if he lied they’ll have to take appropriate action.”
