U.S. immigration authorities deported Brown University medical professor Dr. Rasha Alawieh despite her valid visa and a judge’s order halting her removal.
Alawieh, a Lebanese citizen and kidney transplant specialist, was detained at Boston’s Logan International Airport on Thursday while returning from a trip to visit her parents in Lebanon, according to a court complaint filed by her cousin Yara Chehab, The New York Times reported on Sunday.
Though federal Judge Leo T. Sorokin issued a Friday night order directing the government to give courts 48 hours notice before deporting Alawieh, she was still placed on a flight to Paris, where she was again detained on Saturday.
In an affidavit reviewed by the Times, Clare Saunders, a member of the legal team representing Chehab, said she notified U.S. Customs and Border Protection of the court order on Friday before the flight was scheduled to depart but officers did not act on the information.
In response to the government’s apparent defiance of Sorokin’s directive, the judge filed a second order on Sunday morning. In it, he said there was grounds to believe authorities had “willfully” disobeyed his initial order, and he asked the government to respond to the “serious allegations” by Monday.
On Monday morning, government officials declared they would never intentionally defy a court order but that CBP officials at Boston’s Logan International Airport hadn’t received formal notification of Sorokin’s court order through official channels before Alawieh was put on the flight to Paris.
Though the Trump administration did not initially detail their rationale for detaining Alawieh, Hilton Beckham, the assistant commissioner of public affairs for Customs and Border Protection, told HuffPost that “arriving aliens bear the burden of establishing admissibility to the United States.”
“Our CBP Officers adhere to strict protocols to identify and stop threats, using rigorous screening, vetting, strong law enforcement partnerships, and keen inspectional skills to keep threats out of the country,” the Sunday statement continued. “CBP is committed to protecting the United States from national security threats.”
Federal authorities offered further justification for Alawieh’s expulsion in a Monday court filing, saying that CBP found “sympathetic photos and videos” of prominent Hezbollah figures in the deleted items folder of her cellphone.
The doctor also reportedly told agents that she attended the funeral of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah while in Lebanon, but that she supported him “from a religious perspective” and not a political one.
“CBP questioned Dr. Alawieh and determined that her true intentions in the United States could not be determined,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Sady wrote in a filing to the court obtained by Politico.
Prior to Monday’s court filing from the government, the attorney representing Alawieh and Brown Medicine, Thomas S. Brown, told The New Arab he did not understand why his client was detained and deported.
“We are at a loss as to why this happened,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s a byproduct of the Trump crackdown on immigration. I don’t know if it’s a travel ban or some other issue.”
According to a habeas corpus petition filed on behalf of Alawieh on Friday, she had been issued a valid H-1B visa earlier this month after applying with the sponsorship of her employer, Brown Medicine.
H-1B visas allow foreign citizens with specialized skills to live and work in the U.S. Recently, the program has sparked a contentious debate among conservatives who see them as a way to support the economy and those who want to clamp down on immigration.
Alawieh had previously lived and worked in the U.S. for six years under a J-1 visa, which is issued to students, educators or those conducting research.
Alawieh’s deportation comes as the Trump administration attempts to accelerate its mass deportation plans in multiple ways.
Go Ad-Free — And Protect The Free Press
Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages.
On Saturday, the president invoked a seldom-used wartime authority known as the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to justify deporting hundreds of Venezuelans accused of being gang members.
Earlier in the week, Trump promised to ramp up deportations of foreign-born political activists following the highly publicized detention of Columbia University graduate and green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, who was a central figure in the pro-Palestinian protests that took hold of his New York campus last spring.