US customs officials expel Lebanese doctor over alleged Hezbollah sympathies
Despite visa and court order temporarily barring her expulsion, customs officials deport Rasha Alawieh after she admits to attending Nasrallah’s funeral
BOSTON — A doctor from Lebanon who arrived at the Boston airport on a work visa was deported over the weekend by customs officials, after reportedly admitting to having attended slain Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral.
Dr. Rasha Alawieh had been granted a visa on March 11 and flew into Boston on Thursday, according to a complaint filed on her behalf by a cousin, Yara Chehab, in federal court.
The US Department of Homeland Security said Alawieh admitted to Customs and Border Protection officers that she attended Nasrallah’s funeral last month in Beirut.
“Last month, Rasha Alawieh traveled to Beirut, Lebanon, to attend the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah — a brutal terrorist who led Hezbollah, responsible for killing hundreds of Americans over a four-decade terror spree,” wrote the agency in an X post. “A visa is a privilege not a right — glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be denied.”
Upon landing, Customs and Border Protection officers detained her at the airport for at least 36 hours, through Friday, and planned to send her back to Lebanon.
“CBP questioned Dr. Alawieh and determined that her true intentions in the United States could not be determined,” Assistant US Attorney Michael Sady wrote in the court filing.
US District Judge Leo Sorokin issued an earlier order on Friday that an in-person hearing was scheduled for 10 a.m. on Monday, with Alawieh brought to court. The order barred Alawieh’s removal from Massachusetts without 48 hours’ notice to the judges.
But on Saturday, the cousin filed a motion claiming customs officials “willfully” disobeyed the judge by putting Alawieh on a plane headed for Paris, where she was then set to board a flight for Lebanon.
Sorokin seemed to concur with the cousin’s claim, writing that there was reason to believe customs officials had knowingly flouted his previous order, the New York Times reported.
However he apparently walked this back just as the hearing was set to begin Monday morning, according to CNN, after reportedly receiving testimony that customs officials had only been made aware of his order following Alawieh’s departure from the US.
Lawyers for the government explained in a court filing Monday that officers at the airport did not receive notice of the order until she “had already departed the United States,” the judge noted. They asked that the petition be dismissed.
The judge put a hearing on her case on hold, to give Sorokin’s lawyers time to prepare.
Alawieh, a 34-year-old kidney transplant specialist who previously worked and lived in Rhode Island, was to start work at Brown University as an assistant professor of medicine.
She had worked at Brown prior to the issuance of her H-1B visa, which is granted to skilled foreign nationals to work in the US, the complaint said.
She had held a visa to be in the United States since 2018, when she first came to complete a two-year fellowship at Ohio State University. Before that, she had completed a fellowship at the University of Washington and then moved to the Yale-Waterbury Internal Medicine Program, which she finished in June.
A spokesperson for Brown said Alawieh is an employee of Brown Medicine, with a clinical appointment to Brown.
Her expulsion is the latest move against a foreign-born person with a US visa in the past week, after an anti-Israel student activist at Columbia University was arrested and another student’s visa was revoked.
The Trump administration also transferred hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador even as a federal judge issued an order temporarily barring the deportations.
“My colleagues and I are outraged over Dr Alawieh’s deportation. She is a valued colleague and we hope for justice and her return to Rhode Island,” said George Bayliss, an associate professor of medicine at Brown University.
US Representative Gabe Amo of Rhode Island, a Democrat, said in a statement over the weekend that is “committed to getting answers from the Department of Homeland Security to provide Dr. Alawieh, her family, her colleagues, and our community the clarity we all deserve.”
The Times of Israel Community.