Prince Harry just scored a major legal victory.
A judge ruled that the Duke of Sussex’s U.S visa will stay private after a think tank tried to get his application released to prove whether or not he mentioned his past drug use.
According to BBC, U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols on Monday declared that “the public does not have a strong interest in disclosure of the duke’s immigration records.”
“Like any foreign national, the duke has a legitimate privacy interest in his immigration status,” the judge also said.
In a lawsuit last year, conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation 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 United States in 2020.
The judge acknowledged that Harry shared “intimate details of his life” in his book, per the Daily Mail, but ruled that the exiled royal had a “reasonably privacy interest in his immigration records.”
In June, the DHS denied the Heritage Project’s request to release Harry’s documents.
“To the extent records exist, this office does not find a public interest in disclosure sufficient to override the subject’s privacy interests,” DHS senior director Jimmy Wolfrey wrote in a letter obtained by The Post.
Nile Gardiner, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, said the DHS response “shows an appalling lack of transparency by the Biden Administration” and vowed the battle will continue in court.
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.”
In his interview with Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes” last year, Harry said he relied on alcohol and drugs — such as cocaine, pot and psychedelics — in response to his mother Princess Diana’s death.
The Heritage Foundation has insisted that Harry — who now lives in Montecito, Calif. with his wife, Meghan Markle, and their two children — didn’t mention his history with drugs on his application forms filed before he moved from the UK.
The government warns immigrants that making misleading or false claims on government paperwork is grounds for deportation
Former President Donald Trump has even said he would consider deporting Harry if he’s re-elected in November.
“We’ll have to see if they know something about the drugs, and if he lied they’ll have to take appropriate action,” Trump, 78, declared about the DHS in March.
