It’s one of those cases that was used to sound a dire alarm about President Donald Trump’s administration and his immigration policies: a Lebanese surgeon with an H-1B visa, apparently deported to her native country “for no reason.”
Even the media echoed this line — calling the case a showdown between the White House and the courts.
However, it didn’t take long for the “for no reason” argument to collapse. It depends on whether you believe the reason is sufficient or the evidence is strong enough to justify deportation — but there’s definitely a reason behind it.
So first, the facts as they were known: As The New York Times reported last week, Dr. Rasha Alawieh — “[a] kidney transplant specialist and professor at Brown University’s medical school” — was deported from the country after being detained upon re-arrival in the United States after visiting her native Lebanon.
“Judge Leo T. Sorokin of the Federal District Court in Massachusetts ordered the government on Friday evening to provide the court with 48 hours’ notice before deporting Dr. Alawieh,” the Times reported on March 16. “But she was put on a flight to Paris, presumably on her way to Lebanon.”
Her cousin, Yara Chehab, is contesting the deportation in court.
Naturally, these reports raised reactions like this on social media:
“There is a shortage of American doctors working in Dr. Alawieh’s area of specialty, transplant nephrology. Foreign-born physicians play an important role in the field, according to experts.”
Deported anyway, despite a judge’s order and for no reason. https://t.co/FqXbbjltFq
— Rachel Barnhart (@rachbarnhart) March 17, 2025
Are you glad Rasha Alawieh was sent back to Lebanon?
Yes: 100% (1 Votes)
No: 0% (0 Votes)
Now we’re deporting life-saving doctors for no reason.
Disgusting. #DeportMelaniaNow https://t.co/mGNdqa5DjQ
— MistressWitch (@mistresswitch) March 15, 2025
SICKENING—Trump’s DHS just deported a surgeon from Brown University Medical School—who is here legally on an H1B visa that doesn’t expire until 2027, and has committed no crimes. Trained in the U.S. at Ohio State, University of Washington, and Yale as a **transplant surgeon**… pic.twitter.com/WPT02E3WuV
— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) March 15, 2025
Then there’s Dr. Rasha Alawieh—a transplant doctor at Brown on an H-1B visa—abducted and disappeared from the Logan Airport. Then she was deported despite a court order halting the deportation, because laws have disappeared also. 7/10 pic.twitter.com/sdydIzobPS
— indi.ca (@indica) March 16, 2025
The left-wing commentariat assumed that the Trump administration had just randomly targeted a Lebanese-born surgeon because of some sort of vicious nativist streak.
And then came a spate of reports this week which indicated a pretty good reason for excluding the doctor.
The Associated Press: “Homeland Security officials on Monday said that a doctor from Lebanon who was deported over the weekend despite having a U.S. visa ‘openly admitted’ to supporting a Hezbollah leader and attending his funeral.”
The lawyer for Alawieh, Stephanie Marzouk, promised to keep fighting to get Alawieh back in the country “to see her patients where she should be.”
However, there was this bit after that quote in the AP article: “Marzouk did not immediately return a request for comment surrounding Homeland Security’s allegations that Alawieh supported a Hezbollah leader.”
Obviously, that should be a definite no if it weren’t true, or at least a statement that she didn’t know the facts because she wasn’t in touch with her client.
And it got worse from there, after media sources got a hold of sealed court documents outlining the Department of Justice’s case.
“News outlets that obtained those records before they were sealed reported that Alawieh had photos on her phone of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Lebanese militant group for the past three decades. The Boston Globe reported she also had pictures of Hezbollah ‘fighters and martyrs’ on her phone,” the AP said.
The photos had apparently been deleted days before she arrived in Boston.
“According to Dr. Alawieh, she follows him for his religious and spiritual teachings and not his politics,” the sealed documents apparently read.
When she was asked why she deleted the photos, she reportedly responded, “Because I didn’t want the perception. But I know I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m not related to anything politically or militarily.”
Reuters, meanwhile, said that the doctor had “sympathetic photos and videos” of the former leader of Hezbollah and other militants on her phone when she arrived at Boston Logan Airport, and admitted that she’d attended Nasrallah’s funeral.
“Western governments including the United States designate Hezbollah a terrorist group. The Lebanese militant group is part of the ‘Axis of Resistance’, an alliance of Iran-backed groups across the Middle East that also includes the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, which sparked the Gaza war by attacking Israel 17 months ago,” the wire service noted.
The Department of Homeland Security said that this was grounds enough to deny her re-entry into the country.
“A visa is a privilege not a right — glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be denied. This is commonsense security,” the DHS said in a statement.
In this way, Alawieh’s case is more straightforward than the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University “activist” with alleged terrorist ties.
In that case, DOJ officials planned to use 8 U.S. Code § 1227 as grounds to deport him. That reads, in part: “In general, an alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.”
The United States, of course, views Hezbollah as a terrorist organization — and a prominent member of the medical and academic community who supports that organization and had photos of its “martyrs” and other incriminating evidence of that sort on her phone has a great deal of explaining to do to fight the deportation.
That all being said, the deportation will not be without legal controversy and we expect both her case and that of Mahmoud Khalil to be subject to high-profile court battles over the grounds for it.
And either way, it’s certainly not “for no reason,” unless the court documents are very much mistaken.
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