Appeals Court Won’t Undo Deportation of Brown Doctor Caught With Nasrallah Photos on Her Phone

A federal appeals court has ruled that it has no power to undo the deportation of Dr. Rasha Alawieh, the Lebanese kidney transplant specialist at Brown University Health who was sent back to Beirut after customs officers found images of Hezbollah’s late leader Hassan Nasrallah on her phone. On October 13, 2026, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit affirmed the dismissal of her lawsuit, holding that Congress has barred judicial review of the kind of fast-track removal order she received.

The opinion, written by Judge Sandra Lynch and joined by Judges Gelpí and Dunlap, is short and blunt. “Because Congress, in the Immigration and Naturalization Act (‘INA’), has barred judicial review of such orders,” Lynch wrote, “and Alawieh does not fit within the statutory exception,” the court lacks jurisdiction to hear her claims.

What officers found at Logan

The facts below come from the court’s summary of the record of her March 2025 inspection at the airport. Alawieh came to the United States on an exchange visitor visa in 2018 after earning her medical degree at the American University of Beirut. Brown University Health later hired her and sponsored her for an H-1B visa, which she obtained on June 17, 2024. She practiced transplant nephrology and taught at Brown’s Warren Alpert Medical School.

In February 2025 she traveled home to Lebanon. She flew back through Paris and landed at Boston Logan International Airport on March 13, 2025, where Customs and Border Protection officers inspected her as an applicant for admission, searched her phone and held her overnight.

According to the opinion, officers found photos and videos of Hassan Nasrallah, the recently killed leader of Hezbollah, a group the United States has designated a foreign terrorist organization since October 8, 1997. They also found photos and videos of Hezbollah fighters and “martyrs,” and of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was Iran’s leader at the time. Officers noted that many of those images sat in her deleted-photos folder and had been deleted one or two days before she arrived.

Asked whether she had deleted them, the opinion records, she admitted it and said she did so “[b]ecause I don’t want the perception. But I can’t delete everything. But I know I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m not related to anything politically or militarily. Many of these things are related to being a Shia Muslim.” Pressed on whether she deleted them so they would not be found, she answered: “[s]o I could have done that and deleted everything, but I did not.”

“Not a political person”

The opinion states that Alawieh told officers she knew Hezbollah was a designated terrorist organization and denied supporting it, but “offered no statement criticizing Hezbollah’s terroristic activities.” She acknowledged that her family in Tyre, Lebanon, were Hezbollah supporters. As a devout Shia Muslim, she said, she admired and followed Nasrallah’s religious and spiritual teachings and was saddened by his death, which is why she and her family attended a commemoration of his death during her trip. The Department of Homeland Security said at the time that she had told officers she went to Beirut to attend Nasrallah’s funeral.

When an officer asked why she held Nasrallah “in the highest regards” and chose to ignore what he advocated Hezbollah do, she answered that she is “not a political person.” The court notes she made no statement critical of Nasrallah. Asked about Khamenei, she said: “Again, I’m a Shia Muslim. He’s a religious figure. It has nothing to do with politics.” She told officers the fighter photos had been sent to her by friends and family to see whether the men were from her village.

The officer concluded she was inadmissible because her “true intentions could not be determined due to derogatory information discovered during the inspection process,” issued an expedited removal order dated March 14, 2025, and revoked her visa. That triggered a five-year bar on reentry. She was put on an Air France flight back to Lebanon that evening.

The court order that arrived too late

The case drew national attention because a cousin filed an emergency habeas petition about an hour before her flight, and U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin ordered that she not be moved out of Massachusetts without 48 hours’ notice. She left anyway. The district court later found that CBP officers did not know of the order when they put her on the plane, so they did not violate it.

Through new lawyers, including attorneys from Muslim Advocates, Alawieh filed an amended petition in May 2025 arguing that the CBP officers who removed her were not properly appointed under the Constitution’s Appointments Clause, so her removal order was void. She asked to be placed in regular removal proceedings before an immigration judge and to have her visa reinstated. Sorokin dismissed the case on October 31, 2025, writing, according to the Associated Press, that “This Court simply cannot issue in this habeas action the orders Alawieh hopes to obtain.” Her lawyers took the case to the First Circuit.

The First Circuit’s answer was that federal law allows habeas review of an expedited removal order on only three narrow questions, and the only one relevant here, whether she was ordered removed, is limited to whether an order was in fact issued and whether it relates to her. Congress spelled out that there “shall be no review of whether the alien is actually inadmissible or entitled to any relief from removal.” Alawieh, the court said, challenges the validity of her order, not whether it was issued. Because it lacked jurisdiction, the panel said, it did not reach the merits of her Appointments Clause argument or the dispute over mootness.

What the ruling does and does not decide

To be precise: the appeals court did not find that Alawieh supports Hezbollah, and it did not weigh whether the officer’s judgment was correct. The ruling turns on jurisdiction. But the practical result is final for now. The removal stands, the five-year bar stands, and the federal courts have said they cannot reopen it.

That is how the law is written, and it is how it should work at the border. A visa is permission to enter, not an entitlement, and a customs officer who finds a phone full of images of a terrorist commander, along with a fresh attempt to delete them, is exactly the officer the system expects to make a call. A CBP spokeswoman said at the time that those who “promote extremist ideologies or carry terrorist propaganda are inadmissible to the U.S., plain and simple.”

Supporters of Alawieh argue that a respected physician with deep American ties deserved more process than an overnight interview. The answer from Congress, and now from the First Circuit, is that arriving visa holders are applicants for admission, and the decision on who gets in belongs to the officers Congress empowered to make it.

She said she deleted the Nasrallah photos because she didn’t want the perception, and the officer at Logan formed one anyway, which is exactly the call the law says belongs at the border.

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