A kidney transplant specialist and professor at Brown University‘s medical school has been deported from the US, even though she had a valid visa and a court order temporarily blocking her expulsion, according to her lawyer and court papers.
Dr Rasha Alawieh, 34, is a Lebanese citizen who had travelled to her home country last month. She was detained Thursday when she returned to the US, according to a complaint filed by her cousin Yara Chehab. The US department of justice said Monday Alawieh was deported after discovering “sympathetic photos and videos” of a former longtime leader of Hezbollah and militants in her cell phone’s deleted items folder. Alawieh had also told agents that while in Lebanon she attended the funeral last month of Hezbollah slain chief Hassan Nasrallah, whom she supported from a “religious perspective” as a Shia Muslim.
The DOJ provided those details as it sought to assure a federal judge in Boston that US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) did not willfully disobey an order he issued on Friday that should have halted Alawieh’s immediate removal. Judge Leo T Sorokin had ordered govt Friday evening to provide the court with 48 hours’ notice before deporting Alawieh. But she was put on a flight to Paris, presumably on her way to Lebanon. In a second order filed Sunday morning, the judge said there was reason to believe US Customs and Border Protection had willfully disobeyed his previous order to give the court notice before expelling the doctor.
“It’s a purely religious thing,” she said about the funeral, according to a transcript of the interview. “He’s a very big figure in our community. For me it’s not political.” Western govts, including the US, designate Hezbollah a terrorist group.
Based on the statements and discovery of photos on her phone of Nasrallah and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, supreme leader of Iran, DOJ said CBP concluded “her true intentions in the US could not be determined.” Thomas Brown, a lawyer representing Alawieh and her employer, Brown Medicine, said that while the doctor was in Lebanon, the US Consulate issued her an H-1B visa, which allows highly skilled foreign citizens to live and work in the US.