Boston:
The American authorities said on Monday that they deported a doctor from Rhode Island to Lebanon last week after discovering “sympathetic photos and videos” of the former old leader of Hezbollah and militants in the map of her mobile phone.
Alawieh had also told agents that in Lebanon she attended the funeral of Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah last month, who supported them from a “religious perspective” as a Shiite Muslim.
The US Department of Justice provided those details, because it wanted to ensure a federal judge in Boston that the American customs and border protection he had given on Friday was not intentionally disobedient that the immediate removal of Dr. Rasha Alawieh should have stopped.
The 34-year-old Lebanese citizen, who held an H-1B visa, was held on Thursday at Logan International Airport in Boston after returning from a trip to Lebanon to see family. Her cousin then filed a lawsuit to stop her deportation.
In his first public explanation for her removal, the Ministry of Justice said that Alawieh, a kidney specialist and university teacher at Brown University, was denied to re -enter the United States on the basis of what CBP found on its phone and statements she had made during an interview at the airport.
“It's a purely religious thing,” she said about the funeral, according to a transcript of that interview that was assessed by Reuters. “He is a very big figure in our community. It is not political for me.”
Western governments, including the United States, point Hezbollah to a terrorist group. The Lebanese militant group is part of the “Axis of Resistance”, an alliance of groups supported by Iran in the Middle East who also includes the Palestinian Islamic movement Hamas, which fueled the Gaza war by Israel almost a year ago on October 7.
Based on those statements and the discovery of photos on her phone from Nasrallah and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, the Ministry of Justice said that CBP concluded: “Her true intentions in the United States could not be determined.”
Alawieh and a lawyer for her cousin did not immediately respond to requests for comments.
During Monday's application, the Ministry of Justice also defended CBP officials against claims of the legal team of the cousin that Alawieh was flown out of the country on Friday evening in violation of an order of the American district judge Leo Sorokin that day.
The judge had issued an order with the removal of Alawieh from Massachusetts without a notice period of 48 hours. Yet she was put on a flight to France that night and is now back in Lebanon.
The judge had ordered the government on Sunday to tackle “serious allegations” that his order was intentionally violated prior to a hearing that was planned for Monday.
That hearing was canceled on Monday at the request of the only remaining lawyer of the cousin, after lawyers from the law firm Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer who represented her Pro Bono, called “further zeal” about the fast -moving case.
A lawyer at that company said she had gone to the airport on Friday and a CBP officer had shown a copy of Sorokin's order on her laptop before Alawieh's Air France flight left, and another CBP officer said in a statement on Monday that he had been informed before he brought Alawieh.
But the Ministry of Justice said that the notification had to be received via standard channels and was received by the legal adviser from the office for their assessment and guidance, which did not happen.
“CBP takes judicial orders seriously and strives to always adhere to a judicial order,” wrote the lawyers of the Ministry of Justice.
The application from the Ministry of Justice was later sealed by Sorokin at the request of a lawyer for the cousin. Reuters assessed it from a public terminal in the courthouse before the access was further limited.
(Except for the headline, this story was not edited by Our staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)
