A Brown Medicine kidney doctor who was denied entry to the United States and deported to Lebanon in March is continuing her fight to be allowed back to her home in Rhode Island.
Lawyers for Dr. Rasha Alawieh escalated her case to Federal Appeals Court in Boston on Tuesday, seeking to overturn an October ruling by a federal judge that dismissed Alawieh’s case and left her banned from the U.S. for five years.
The case began in March, when Alawieh’s family alleged that U.S. Customs and Border Protection removed her from the country despite a federal judge ordering CBP to provide the court 48 hours notice.
After Alawieh was detained while attempting to re-enter the country at Logan Airport, her lawyers filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to stop her removal. Alawieh held a valid H-1B temporary visa in her passport when she arrived in Boston after visiting family in Lebanon, Cranston-based attorney Thomas Brown said at the time.
Alawieh asked a federal judge to declare her removal unconstitutional. But in October, the judge dismissed the case, saying that the court lacked the authority to rule in her favor because she was no longer in U.S. custody.
Federal officials have claimed Alawieh has links to Hezbollah, which was designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. In March, Tricia McLaughlin, Assistant Secretary of Public Affairs for the Department of Homeland Security, said in an email that “Alawieh traveled to Beirut, Lebanon, to attend the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah — a brutal terrorist who led Hezbollah, responsible for killing hundreds of Americans over a four-decade terror spree. Alawieh openly admitted to this to CBP officers, as well as her support of Nasrallah.”
U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin’s October dismissal did not address the validity of federal officials’ claims.
Golnaz Fakhimi, an attorney with the Washington D.C.-based Muslim Advocates who filed Alawieh’s appeal, was not immediately available to discuss the case.
Alawieh, who specializes in transplant nephrology, had been working under her H-1B visa in the Division of Kidney Disease & Hypertension at Brown Medicine. She worked on the transplant service at Rhode Island Hospital and held a clinical appointment at Brown University.
