Rasha Alawieh, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Brown University, was detained at Boston Logan International Airport on Thursday after visiting family in Lebanon. A family member learned of her planned deportation on Friday and alerted her attorneys.
She hold a valid H-1B visa, which was recently issued by the U.S. consulate in Beirut.
The petition claims Alawieh is being held “without any justification” or permission to access legal counsel. It states her visa was approved by the State Department and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and hence, the reason for her detention by Customs and Border Protection remains unclear.
Her lawyer Thomas S. Brown also said, as reported by The Providence Journal, there had been some “wrinkle” with her visa application that had been “relatively easy” to work out “because they did issue the visa, so whatever is going on is not the consequence of the actions at the American consulate, as far as I know.”
The case will be heard on Monday by a federal judge in Boston, who on Sunday demanded information on whether US Customs and Border Protection had “willfully” disobeyed his order.
U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, said he had received a “detailed and specific” timeline of the events from an attorney working on Alawieh’s behalf that raised “serious allegations” about whether his order was violated.
Meanwhile, Brown Spokesperson Brian Clark said the University is trying to seek more information about the situation. “We need to be careful about sharing information publicly about an individual’s personal circumstances,” he wrote in an email to The Herald.
