Dr. Rasha Alawieh is a kidney transplant specialist at the Division of Kidney Disease & Hypertension at Brown Medicine, an affiliate of Brown University. Alawieh was in the U.S. on an H-1B visa, meant for highly specialized workers. She went to visit family in Lebanon in February, and when she returned to Boston’s Logan International Airport, she was detained for 36 hours and had her phone taken from her, according to court documents filed by her cousin, who obtained the court order temporarily barring officials from sending Alawieh back.
Colleagues say Alawieh’s lawyers made a frantic call to the airport control tower trying to stop her plane from taking off.
“We got the phone number for the control tower […] on the internet,” says George Bayliss, medical director of the transplant program. A lawyer called air traffic controllers imploring them to stop the plane, Bayliss says, but they were told they couldn’t. Alawieh’s lawyers accuse U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials of “willfully” disobeying the court order by sending her back to Lebanon.
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In the separate case of the German national, family members say 34-year-old electrical engineer Fabian Schmidt was detained for days when he tried to return to Logan Airport from a trip to Europe. They allege he was “violently interrogated.”
“He had to go and be stripped naked and was showered by two officers with ice cold water, and was interrogated again,” his mother, Astrid Senior, told GBH reporter Sarah Betancourt. “He hardly got anything to drink. And then he wasn’t feeling very well and he collapsed.”
Schmidt was transported to a Boston hospital and later found out that he had influenza, according to his family.
“These claims are blatantly false with respect to CBP,” Beckham said in a statement, without specifying which claims.