A California immigration judge ruled Wednesday that Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a Hamas founder and former Israeli spy, will be granted U.S. asylum and allowed to remain in the country if he passes a routine background check.

The ruling represented a change of heart for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which denied Yousef’s previous asylum request in February 2009, saying he was a “a danger to the security of the United States” who was “engaged in terrorist activity.”

Yousef wrote on his blog last month that he was going into the hearing “guilty unless I can prove to their satisfaction that I am not a threat to U.S. security.” The much-anticipated hearing, however, lasted only 15 minutes after the agency announced they were dropping their objections. Yousef argued that, if deported, he would be killed for abandoning Islam and spying for Israel’s internal security service Shin Bet.

Involvement with Hamas
Yousef is the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a senior figure in the militant Palestinian Islamist group whose goal is to destroy Israel through violence and terror and replace it with an Islamic state. Yousef documents his involvement with his father’s organization in his memoirs Son of Hamas, which was released earlier this year. Yousef wrote on his blog that he provided an early draft of his book to the Department of Homeland Security as evidence that he was not a terrorist.

Far from clearing his name, however, the agency used the book as support for their objections, pointing to situations including one in which Yousef delivered to a safe house five men who were implicated in a March 2001 suicide bombing. Kerri Calcador, Homeland Security attorney, said in a statement that the action proved that Yousef provided “material support to a [Tier I] terrorist organization.”

Yousef, who was already working as a secret agent for Shin Bet at the time, defended himself, writing on his blog that “My job required me to do anything I could to be involved with my father’s activities.” He said that both he and Shin Bet were unaware that the men he had driven were suspects in a bombing.

No longer a terrorist
Yousef, who has been disowned by his father, became disillusioned with the violence of Hamas, and started working as an informant for Shin Bet in 1997. After converting to Christianity and moving to the United States in 2007, he voluntarily approached Homeland Security to file his application for asylum.

“I wanted them to see that they have huge gaps in their security and their understanding of terrorism and make changes before it’s too late,” he wrote on his blog.

“Yes, while working for Israeli intelligence, I posed as a terrorist. Yes, I carried a gun. Yes, I was in terrorist meetings with Yassir Arafat, my father and other Hamas leaders,” he wrote. “It was part of my job.”

Yousef, who currently resides in San Diego, plans to pursue U.S. citizenship and a master’s degree in history and geography.