A professor with a valid visa has been deported from the United States under the Trump administration despite a court order stopping the administration from doing so.
Dr. Rasha Alawieh, 34, is a Lebanese citizen, kidney transplant specialist, and professor at Brown University’s medical school, who traveled to Lebanon last month to visit family. Upon returning to the U.S., she was detained, denied entry, and flown out of the country.
Judge Leo T. Sorokin from the Federal District Court in Massachusetts ordered the government on Friday to provide the court with 48 hours’ notice before deporting Alawieh. Still, she was put on a flight to Paris, which is believed to be a stop on her way to Lebanon.
In a second order filed on Sunday morning, Sorokin said there was reason to believe U.S. Customs and Border Protection had willfully disobeyed his order to give the court notice before deporting Alawieh. The judge said he had followed “common practice in this district as it has been for years.”
He ordered the CBP to respond to what he called “serious allegations” by 8:30 a.m. on Monday, and a court hearing is scheduled in Boston at 10:00 a.m.
Alawieh’s cousin, Yara Chehab, filed the complaint against Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, Peter Flores.
According to the complaint, Alawieh was held at Boston Logan International Airport for 36 hours for unclear reasons. Chehab said before Alawieh was put back on the plane out of the U.S., federal authorities had unlawfully detained her “without any justification and without permitting [her] access to their counsel.”
While she was in Lebanon, the U.S. Consulate issued Alawieh an H-1B visa, which allows highly skilled foreign citizens to live and work in the U.S. Brown Medicine sponsored her application for the visa, according to Thomas Brown, a lawyer representing Alawieh and Brown Medicine.
Alawieh’s lawyers alleged that “Customs and Border Patrol received actual notice of the court’s order [giving the court 48 notice before any deportation] and nonetheless thereafter ‘willfully’ disobeyed the order by sending her out of the United States.”
Sorokin seemingly agreed, writing in his order on Sunday that “These allegations are supported by a detailed and specific timeline in an under oath affidavit filed by an attorney.”
In a Sunday letter to the university community, the Brown University administration advised international students, ahead of spring break, to “consider postponing or delaying personal travel outside the United States until more information is available from the U.S. Department of State.” Trump is reportedly set to release a list of countries from which he is restricting travel into the U.S., but Lebanon is not on that list.
Similarly, the White House was accused of actively disregarding a court order from Judge James Boasberg, which they have denied. Boasberg ordered that planes with Venezuelan migrants being deported to El Salvador be turned around in midair. The White House has claimed that the flights had left U.S. airspace and were above international waters when the ruling was issued.
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The judge, however, said the plane’s location did not affect the order.
“You shall inform your clients of this immediately any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States,” Boasberg said in his verbal order.
