Final week, a Brown College surgeon was deported to Lebanon in violation of a courtroom order. Whereas it was not instantly clear why the physician, Rasha Alawieh, had been detained and deported, the Division of Homeland Safety (DHS) later alleged that she had expressed help for the terrorist group Hezbollah.
“A visa is a privilege not a proper—glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill People is grounds for visa issuance to be denied. That is commonsense safety,” the DHS stated in a Monday put up on X.
Alawieh, who graduated from medical faculty in Lebanon, first got here to the US in 2018 to begin a fellowship at Ohio State College. She later started working as a kidney transplant specialist and professor at Brown College’s medical faculty and obtained an H-1B visa.
In accordance with CNN, Alawieh’s immigration points first started final month, when she traveled to Lebanon, and her visa to renter the US was delayed because of elevated safety vetting of Lebanese vacationers. The DHS posted on X that Alawieh had attended the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah, the previous chief of Hezbollah who was assassinated by Israeli forces final 12 months. “Alawieh overtly admitted to this to CBP officers, in addition to her help of Nasrallah,” the put up reads.
It is unclear why Alawieh was stopped by border officers when she arrived in Boston final Friday. A courtroom submitting obtained by Boston native information station WCVB states that Alawieh was discovered with images of Nasrallah on her cellphone—although, once more, it isn’t clear why her cellphone was being searched within the first place.
“In explaining why these a number of images had been deleted by her one to 2 days earlier than she arrived at Logan Airport, Dr. Alawieh acknowledged that she didn’t wish to give authorities the notion that she helps Hezbollah and the Ayatollah politically or militarily,” the submitting learn.
In accordance with the doc, Alawieh defined “I believe if you happen to hearken to one in every of his sermons, you’d know what I imply. He’s a spiritual, religious individual. As I stated, he has very excessive worth. His teachings are about spirituality and morality.”
The day after Alawieh was detained, her first cousin filed a grievance in federal courtroom alleging that border officers had violated her Fifth Modification proper to due course of. A choose agreed, ruling that Alawieh couldn’t be taken out of Massachusetts with out a minimum of a “forty-eight hours prior discover to the Courtroom,” in keeping with CNN.
Officers moved to deport Alawieh anyway—leaving her path again to the US murky. Alawieh is just not the one authorized U.S. resident to face deportation after nebulous allegations of help for terrorism. Columbia pupil activist Mahmoud Khalil was seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and brought to an immigration detention heart in Louisiana earlier this month. Whereas Khalil, a inexperienced card holder, hasn’t been accused of any crime, Trump administration officers have explicitly singled out his speech as the reason for his seizure. Khalil had organized a collection of anti-Israel protests, throughout which protesters allegedly distributed flyers bearing Hamas logos, in keeping with White Home press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
“This administration is just not going tolerate people having the privilege of learning in our nation after which siding with pro-terrorist organizations which have killed People,” Leavitt stated final week. “We’ve a zero-tolerance coverage for siding with terrorists, interval.”
