Trump Kicks Off Constitutional Crisis With Doctor’s Deportation
Ivy League doctor and legal visa holder Rasha Alawieh was deported—despite a court order.

The Trump administration openly defied a court order and deported a Brown University professor and kidney transplant specialist.
Dr. Rasha Alawieh traveled to her native Lebanon to visit relatives last month, and was detained on Thursday upon her return to the U.S. A District Court judge in Massachusetts, Leo Sorokin, ordered the government in a Friday evening ruling to give 48 hours advance notice before deporting Alawieh, but she was put on a flight out of the country the same night anyway.
According to Thomas Brown, an attorney who handles immigration issues for Brown University doctors, Alawieh had a valid H-1B visa, which is granted to skilled foreign citizens in “specialty occupations.” The doctor had studied and worked in the U.S. for six years prior to her rushed deportation, which took place “without any justification and without permitting [her] access to their counsel,” according to a Friday legal complaint from her cousin, Yara Chehab.
Alawieh’s lawyers filed a motion Saturday saying “that Customs and Border Patrol received actual notice of the court’s order and nonetheless thereafter ‘willfully’ disobeyed the order by sending her out of the United States.”
Sorokin then issued a second court order on Sunday saying that there was reason to believe Customs and Border Protection defied his initial ruling on purpose, saying he followed “common practice in this district as it has been for years” and ordered CBP to respond to “serious allegations” at a court hearing scheduled for Monday.
“These allegations,” Judge Sorokin said Sunday in his ruling, “are supported by a detailed and specific timeline in an under oath affidavit filed by an attorney.”
This wasn’t the only court ruling that the Trump administration openly defied over the weekend. The White House deported hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador, alleging they were gang members, despite a court order to halt the deportations. The planes continued on to San Salvador, where their arrival was made into a propaganda video by El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele.
Bukele later posted, “Oopsie…Too late,” with a tears-of-joy emoji on X while quoting a news article about the court order, taking the Trump administration’s lead and blatantly disrespecting the federal judiciary. All of this sets off a constitutional crisis in the United States, as Trump’s actions are not likely to be met with punitive articles of impeachment or any other mechanism to enforce a court ruling. The U.S. is now in uncharted territory.