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A federal appeals court in Boston has ruled that it has no power to review the March 2025 airport deportation of Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese kidney specialist who held an H-1B visa and taught at Brown University’s medical school. The Oct. 13 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, reported Oct. 16 by the Boston Globe, leaves her five-year bar on returning in place and shows how little a court can do once a Customs and Border Protection officer issues an expedited removal order at a port of entry.
Since March 2025 the case has been watched as a test of whether a judge’s order can halt a removal already under way. The appeal answered a more lasting question for every H-1B worker, student and visa holder who travels: if an airport officer decides you should not be admitted, can a federal judge step in? For an order like Alawieh’s, the answer is almost never.
One night at Logan
Alawieh landed at Boston Logan on March 13, 2025, returning from Lebanon. Like every returning visa holder, she was legally an applicant for admission. According to the opinion, CBP officers searched her phone, held her overnight and found photos and videos of Hezbollah and Iranian figures. She acknowledged deleting some images before the flight and denied supporting Hezbollah’s political or military activities. Her lawyers have said she attended a commemoration of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah for religious reasons, the Boston Globe reported; federal authorities have said that attendance and the photos were the reason for her removal.
An officer found her inadmissible under 8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(7)(A)(i)(I), the documents ground, because her “true intentions could not be determined.” She signed an expedited removal order under 8 U.S.C. 1225(b)(1), had her visa revoked and was flown out the next evening. A habeas petition filed an hour before the flight produced a 48-hour notice order from U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin, who later found the officers did not know of it and dismissed her amended case for lack of jurisdiction.
A window that only asks whether the order exists
Congress largely closed the courthouse door on expedited removal in 1996. The one habeas exception, in 8 U.S.C. 1252(e)(2), is confined by Section 1252(e)(5) to whether an order “in fact was issued and whether it relates to the petitioner.” The statute adds that there is no review of whether the person “is actually inadmissible or entitled to any relief from removal.”
Alawieh’s lawyers tried to fit through that window with a constitutional argument: the CBP officers who ordered her removal were not properly appointed under the Appointments Clause, so the order was void and, legally, never issued. Senior Judge Sandra Lynch, writing for a panel that included Judges Gustavo Gelpí and Joshua Dunlap, rejected that framing. “Nothing in the text of § 1252(e)(2)(B) gives us jurisdiction over Alawieh’s challenge,” she wrote. A claim that an order is invalid, the court reasoned, is different from a claim that no order exists, and only the second fits the exception.
The court did not decide whether the appointments argument is right. Alawieh had dropped her Suspension Clause claim, unsurprising after the Supreme Court in DHS v. Thuraissigiam (2020) upheld these review limits against that challenge. “Given that the statute is so clear, I am not surprised by the outcome,” Deborah S. Gonzalez, who directs the immigration law clinic at Roger Williams University School of Law, told the Globe.
Where the real decision gets made
The practical lesson is that secondary inspection, not the courtroom, is where a visa holder’s future is settled. An officer who finds a traveler inadmissible can issue an expedited removal order, which triggers the five-year bar in 8 U.S.C. 1182(a)(9)(A)(i), or can allow the traveler to withdraw the application for admission under 8 C.F.R. 235.4, which generally does not carry that bar. Withdrawal is discretionary. After this ruling, courts in the First Circuit have no room to second-guess the officer’s choice once the order exists and names the person.
Phone searches like the one that started Alawieh’s case remain rare overall. CBP reports that it searched 47,047 electronic devices in fiscal 2024 while processing more than 420 million travelers, which the agency describes as less than 0.01 percent of arriving international travelers. When a search ends in expedited removal, the ruling confirms, the officer’s judgment is essentially final.
Alawieh could seek review by the full First Circuit or the Supreme Court; her plans have not been reported. The appointments theory, untested on its merits, is likely to resurface elsewhere, possibly as a systemic challenge, which Section 1252(e)(3) channels to the federal court in Washington, D.C., within 60 days of the challenged policy.
This article is for general information and is not legal advice.
Sources
- Alawieh v. Mullin, No. 25-2238 (1st Cir. Oct. 13, 2026), opinion
- GovInfo: Alawieh v. Mullin, First Circuit case record
- 8 U.S.C. 1252, judicial review of orders of removal
- U.S. Customs and Border Protection: Border Search of Electronic Devices at Ports of Entry (fiscal 2024 statistics)
- The Boston Globe: Dr. Rasha Alawieh, deported R.I. kidney doctor, loses appeal in federal court (Oct. 16, 2026)
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