A Brown University medical professor was deported to Lebanon over the weekend despite having a valid US work visa, defying a judge’s order blocking her immediate removal from the country.
Federal prosecutors on Monday alleged that they deported 34-year-old Rasha Alawieh after discovering “sympathetic photos and videos” on hercell phone of prominent figures of Iran-backed Hezbollah. Alawieh told federal agents that she had recently attended the funeral of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, whom she supported from a “religious perspective”, according to Reuters.
The case centering on Alawieh comes as Donald Trump’s second presidential administration has been escalating its immigration policies and targeting universities.
On Sunday, the US deported more than 250 immigrants, allegedly members of a Venezuelan and Salvadorian gang, to El Salvador despite a judge’s order halting the flights.
Alawieh was detained at Boston’s Logan international airport on Thursday after a trip to Lebanon to visit family. Her cousin, Yara Chehab, filed a lawsuit soon after in Massachusetts federal court on her behalf.
On Friday, US district court judge Leo Sorokin issued an order scheduling a hearing for Alawieh on Monday – and said that the federal government must give 48 hours’ notice to the court before her removal from the country. That hearing, however, was delayed at the request of an attorney for Chehab after other lawyers representing Chehab withdrew from the case, citing “further diligence”, as CNN reported. No other details were immediately available.
Nonetheless, in clear defiance of Sorokin’s order from Friday, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) put Alawieh on a flight to Paris that presumably was a layover back to Lebanon.
On Sunday, Sorokin said in court documents that CBP had received notice of the court order but “nonetheless thereafter willfully disobeyed the order by sending [Alawieh] out of the United States”. Sorokin ordered the government to respond to the “serious allegations with a legal and factual response” and a description of their version of events by Monday morning, ahead of a scheduled court hearing.
CBP did not immediately respond to the Guardian’s request for comment. In a comment to Reuters, a CBP spokesperson said that officers “adhere to strict protocols to identify and stop threats” and the burden is on people to establish admissibility into the US.
In a statement obtained by Reuters, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin called the deportation “commonsense security”.
“A visa is a privilege, not a right – glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be denied,” she said.
In a statement, a Brown spokesperson said that the university was “seeking to learn more about what has happened, but we need to be careful about sharing information publicly about any individual’s personal circumstances”.
Brown noted that Alawieh had a clinical appointment with the university but was an employee of Brown Medicine, a non-profit that is affiliated with the medical school but is not operated by the university.
On Sunday, after Alawieh’s deportation, Brown sent an email advising international students and faculty members to avoid international travel due to “potential changes in travel restrictions and travel bans”.
Dr George Bayliss, a Brown medical professor who works with Alawieh at the university’s division of kidney disease and hypertension, told the New York Times that the staff “are all outraged”.
“None of us know why this happened,” he said.
Before Sunday’s mass deportation to El Salvador, the US district court judge James Boasberg said that the Trump White House could not accelerate the deportations out by invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a centuries-old wartime law giving the president that ability. Boasberg ordered the Trump administration to explain whether it had violated the judge’s order with its mass deportation at a hearing scheduled for late Monday afternoon.
On Sunday, the White House released a statement upbraiding Boasberg, an extraordinary display of defiance against the judiciary, which has served as a check on presidential power throughout the history of the US.
“A single judge in a single city cannot direct the movement of an aircraft … full of foreign alien terrorists who were physically expelled from US soil,” the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement.
Alawieh’s removal also comes at a time when the Trump administration has targeted universities, particularly Columbia University, after the series of pro-Palestinian protests it saw in 2024.
Recently, federal law enforcement with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detained Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia graduate student with a green card who was a leader of the protests, for deportation.
Ranjani Srinivasan, a graduate student at Columbia from India, was also targeted by immigration authorities at the beginning of March despite having no ties to the protests. Srinivasan fled to Canada, which US officials have described as a “self-deportation”, according to the New York Times.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is also considering new travel restrictions for citizens of dozens of countries. A draft list of countries showed three separate groups that would undergo either full or partial visa suspensions.
