The White House used a photo of a waving President Donald Trump from his McDonald’s campaign stunt to mock the deported Brown University doctor.
Dr. Rasha Alawieh was deported to Lebanon, where she is a citizen, after arriving at Boston Logan International Airport at the weekend following a trip home to visit family.
In a social media post on X, the Department of Homeland Security claimed while in the country, Alawieh “attend[ed] the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah – a brutal terrorist who led Hezbollah, responsible for killing hundreds of Americans over a four-decade terror spree.”
Mocking Alawieh, the White House shared the department’s post with a photo of Trump waving from the drive-thru window of the suburban Philadelphia McDonald’s branch he visited on the campaign trail last October.
In court documents defending the doctor’s removal revealed Monday, government lawyers claimed she supported Nasrallah “from a religious perspective.” They also claimed to have discovered “sympathetic photos and videos” on her phone.
“Alawieh openly admitted to this to CBP officers, as well as her support of Nasrallah,” the department also claimed in its X post, amplified by the White House. “A visa is a privilege not a right—glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be denied. This is commonsense security.”
The Independent has contacted Alawieh’s immigration attorney for comment.
A federal judge canceled a hearing Monday into why Alawieh was deported at the weekend apparently in defiance of a court order that she remain in the U.S.
Government lawyers argued that border agents had not received notice of last Friday’s order until she “had already departed the United States.” Lawyers for Alawieh also asked to postpone a hearing so new attorneys on the case have more time to prepare.
The government will have until March 24 to address allegations, and attorneys for Alawieh have until March 31 to respond to the government’s motion to dismiss the case, the judge wrote Monday.
The doctor has studied and worked in the U.S. for six years. She was in the country on a H-1B visa and has been working at Rhode Island Hospital for the last year caring for kidney transplant recipients, the transplant division’s medical director Dr. George Bayliss told the Boston Globe.
After the Trump administration’s allegations against Alawieh emerged, a spokesperson for Brown University told the New York Times: “We continue to seek to learn more about what has happened.”
