Homeland Security says professor deported to Lebanon with US visa supported Hezbollah leader

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00:00The deportation of a Lebanese doctor has really sparked alarm here in the United States. Dr.

00:04Rasha Alawiya, a kidney transplant doctor at Rhode Island Hospital and an assistant professor

00:10at Brown University, was deported on Friday night. Now, she had gone from Lebanon to Boston

00:17Airport, and she was detained at Boston Airport as she was returning from a family trip to Lebanon.

00:24Now, initially, it was unclear why she was being detained, but then it transpired that

00:30she was deported on Friday night after border agents found photos on her phone which they said

00:38indicated that she was sympathetic to an extremist group. They found photos of Hezbollah's late

00:43leader, Hassan Nasrallah. And in an interview with the agents, Dr. Alawiya said that she had,

00:50whilst in Lebanon, attended the funeral of Nasrallah. Now, in that same interview,

00:54she also explained that she had attended not for political but rather for religious

00:59reasons because he had been a big figure in her Shiite community in Lebanon.

01:04Now, her deportation has really had a chilling effect because it comes

01:10right after the detention of Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil. He was the lead negotiator

01:17in protests over the Gaza war at Columbia University last year. And he has been detained,

01:23and the Trump administration says that it's going to deport him for his views on Hamas. It argues

01:30that he's a Hamas sympathizer. His defenders say, no, he is simply someone speaking out for the

01:37rights of the Palestinian people. Well, all of this has really had a chilling effect,

01:41and civil rights defenders say that it's an assault on the First Amendment, on freedom

01:46of speech, the type of assault that would only happen in a really repressive regime

01:52where people are targeted for going out to protest over their political beliefs.

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