About that Lebanese Doctor We Deported...

Over the weekend, I saw a few mainstream media headlines about the Donald Trump administration deporting a "doctor" and "kidney transplant specialist." I barely glanced at them because these articles had the same "how dare he?" kind of tone to them that I've been reading for nearly two months now. It's getting old, much like the boy who cried wolf. And there's usually more to the story. 

In this case, as it turns out, the Trump Administration did, indeed, deport a "doctor" and "kidney transplant specialist." What they failed to leave out is that she also appears to be something of a Hezbollah fan. 

Thirty-four-year-old Rasha Alawieh of Providence, Rhode Island, who is also an assistant professor at Brown University, arrived at Boston’s Logan International Airport on Thursday after a trip to her home country of Lebanon to allegedly visit her family. When she was met and detained by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents at the airport, she allegedly admitted that she had attended a funeral for Hassan Nasrallah. 

Nasrallah was Hezbollah's leader for over 30 years. He was killed when Israel bombed a building in September in Beirut where he was meeting with Hezbollah commanders. 

In addition to attending Nasrallah's funeral, Alawieh reportedly had "'sympathetic photos and video' of Hezbollah figures on her cell phone," which she claims were sent to her via Whatsapp chats with friends and family. Politico reports that she told an immigration officer that she followed Nasrallah's teachings from a "religious perspective" rather than a political one because she is a Shia Muslim and he is a respected figure in their religious community. When asked if she knew if Hezbollah was considered a terrorist group by the United States, she said, "I’m not much into politics, but yes." 

According to the New York Post, Alawieh came to the United States on a visa in 2018 to complete a two-year fellowship at Ohio State. "She continued to carry her status at subsequent fellowships at the University of Washington and the Yale-Waterbury Internal Medicine Program, which she completed in June. Alawieh was then granted an H-1B visa from the US Consulate in Lebanon, authorizing her to work at Brown University..."    

After she was detained and interviewed, CBP determined that she could not return to the United States and canceled her visa "due to derogatory information discovered during the inspection process." On Friday night, she was deported, and by Sunday morning, she had arrived back home in Lebanon. 

Politico also reports that her "cousin filed a habeas corpus petition on Friday evening seeking her release." Half an hour later, U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin, a Bill Clinton appointee, issued an order stating that she "shall not be moved outside the District of Massachusetts without providing the Court 48 hours’ advance notice of the move and the reason therefor." He scheduled a hearing for Monday.   

Alawieh's family claims the government purposely ignored his orders, and on Sunday, Sorokin issued another order, demanding that the CBP explain why she was deported and citing the family's "serious allegations." However, Monday's hearing was canceled, in part because Alawieh switched lawyers. According to CBS, "The government made a filing under seal, and Sorokin said in his latest order that the filing included an affidavit from a CBP watch commander and government attorneys said at 'no time would CBP not take a court order seriously or fail to abide by a court's order.'"

I keep hearing a lot of people screaming about this woman's "rights," but as Marco Rubio said on Face the Nation yesterday, "I don't know what we have gotten it in our head that a visa is some sort of birthright. It is not. It is a visitor into our country. And if you violate the terms of your visitation, you are going to leave." I also feel like, given the chance, a lot of these people would deport half the country just because they voted for Donald Trump if they had the chance. 

Obviously, this story is far from over, and I'd be interested to learn how Alawieh came to be on the government's radar in the first place. The left paints her as some sort of pitiful yet highly skilled doctor who was just minding her own business, but I feel like there has to be some other missing piece of the puzzle here.

And if there is more to the story, we'll bring it to you here at PJ Media...without a side of liberal bias that you've come to expect from the mainstream media. 

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