The U.S. needs kidney doctors. The Trump administration deported one despite her valid visa

Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a kidney doctor who trained at the University of Washington, has been denied re-entry into the United States, despite having a valid visa.

Alawieh is from Lebanon and is currently employed at Brown University in Rhode Island.

Her deportation is the latest in a recent string of unusual arrests by immigration officials at U.S. borders, and not the first in which attorneys and judges have decried a lack of due process. Stories of tourists and legal residents being detained and deported have seemingly become more common with the Trump administration’s emphasis on border security and deportations.

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The Department of Homeland Security said it deported Alawieh because she attended the funeral of a “brutal terrorist who led Hezbollah.” Court records say she responded that she attended for religious, not political, reasons. A judge told the U.S. government to keep Alawieh in the country and bring her to an in-person hearing on Monday, March 17, but she was still deported over the weekend. The government denies any wrongdoing.

Dr. Arthur Anderson is a Seattle kidney doctor, or nephrologist, who worked with Alawieh at UW Medicine. Her desk was right outside his office. Anderson is someone who gets to work early, he said — but, even so, “every day [when] I came in, she was there. And when I left, she was still there.”

Anderson said the United States needs doctors like Alawieh. One in seven people in the U.S. has kidney disease, and they often rely on immigrants for their care. While, in general, about 20% of physicians are immigrants, nearly 50% of kidney doctors are.

Anderson said the reason for that is that there aren’t enough U.S.-born doctors who want to pursue the field of nephrology. It requires a lot of training — four years of medical school, then three years of a residency in internal medicine, and another two years of a fellowship in nephrology. Becoming a transplant nephrologist like Alawieh requires even one more fellowship year after that. And it’s a unique and emotionally trying field.

“Nephrology takes a quirky person, somebody who’s interested in math, likes numbers,” Anderson said. “[In] nephrology, you see a lot of death.”

Kidney doctors care for their patients for years. And people with end-stage kidney disease, who need dialysis, have a life expectancy of about five years — so nephrologists see a lot of their patients, whom they know well, die.

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U.S. taxpayers generally pick up the tab for the 10 years of postgraduate training required to become a transplant nephrologist. Most of the money funding residencies and fellowships comes from Medicare and Medicaid.

“Rasha's training probably cost half a million and they just burned that investment in American healthcare by deporting her,” said Dr. Annemarie Dooley, another Seattle-area nephrologist.

Anderson said he’s been urging the medical societies he’s part of to make a public statement in support of Alawieh — but so far, he hasn’t seen any.

“They're probably fearful of repercussions, because everybody wants funding from the NIH to do research,” Anderson said. “It makes me feel like there's cowards everywhere because of money.”

KUOW reached out to several professional societies to ask for their statements about Alawieh or their reasons for not taking a position, but did not hear back.

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Alawieh’s story is now among a handful of other unusual experiences among tourists and legal residents in the United States.

A British tourist was arrested by ICE in Washington state when officials at the U.S.-Canada border said she didn’t have a proper work visa and had been performing household chores for lodging.

Two German tourists were detained then deported after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border; they told the New York Times they did not know why. Another German, with a green card, was arrested in Boston.

A Canadian citizen employed in California told the New York Times she was attempting to reapply for a visa at the San Ysidro border crossing (that is the standard way for Canadians and Mexicans to renew their TN work visas), but she was told she needed to go to a consulate instead. She told the Times she was then arrested and sent to an ICE facility.

Dyer Oxley contributed to this report.