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In recent weeks, a number of U.S. visa and green-card holders have recounted harrowing ordeals at the hands of authorities, including sudden arrests at ports of entry and multi-week stays in ICE detention facilities. These incidents have come as President Trump cracks down on all kinds of immigration and as international tourists are reportedly canceling or reconsidering their U.S. travel plans in response to various administration policies. But it can be difficult to determine whether these are isolated cases of routine enforcement or whether they presage a new era of arbitrary punishment. Last week’s arrest of green-card holder and former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil was clearly political — which he is now calling attention to — while other cases seem more happenstance. Here’s a look at some of the most prominent stories in the news and what we know about them.
Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese doctor at Brown University
Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a 34-year-old kidney-transplant specialist at Brown University medical school with a valid visa, was deported on Saturday despite a court order temporarily blocking her deportation. Alawieh is a Lebanese citizen who was detained at Boston Logan International Airport on Thursday after returning to the U.S. from her native Lebanon. The U.S. Consulate there had issued her an H-1B visa sponsored by her employer, Brown Medicine. At Logan, CBP officers found evidence suggesting Alawieh was sympathetic to the Hezbollah militant group and canceled her visa, according to a court filing made by the Justice Department on Monday.
After Alawieh’s cousin filed a court complaint, U.S. District Court Judge Leo T. Sorokin barred the government from deporting her without giving the court 48 hours notice, but she was put on a flight to Paris the next day, despite last-minute attempts by her attorneys to halt the flight at the airport. The judge then demanded an explanation on Sunday, the New York Times reports.
Over the weekend, it wasn’t clear why Alawieh was detained and deported; a CBP official initially told WBUR that “our CBP officers adhere to strict protocols to identify and stop threats, using rigorous screening, vetting, strong law-enforcement partnerships, and keen inspectional skills to keep threats out of the country.” Then, on Monday, Justice Department officials said in a court filing that CBP officers had found evidence she was sympathetic to Hezbollah, Politico reports:
Federal authorities say they deported a Lebanese doctor holding an American visa last week after finding “sympathetic photos and videos” of prominent Hezbollah figures in the deleted items folder of her cell phone. [Alawieh] also told Customs and Border Protection agents that while visiting Lebanon last month she attended the funeral of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and supported him “from a religious perspective” but not a political one.
“With the discovery of these photographs and videos CBP questioned Dr. Alawieh and determined that her true intentions in the United States could not be determined,” a U.S. Attorney wrote in the court filing. “As such, CBP canceled her visa and deemed Dr. Alawieh inadmissible to the United States.” The government also said that CBP officials did not get the judge’s order blocking Alawieh’s deportation until after her plane had already departed.
WCVB, a local ABC affiliate, reports that court papers show Alawieh was asked about the deleted photos during questioning:
“In explaining why these multiple photos were deleted by her one to two days before she arrived at Logan Airport, Dr. Alawieh stated that she did not want to give authorities the perception that she supports Hezbollah and the Ayatollah politically or militarily,” the paperwork read.
Thomas S. Brown, an attorney who handles immigration issues for Brown Medicine doctors, initially told the Providence Journal that there had been a “wrinkle” with her visa application but that she was still issued a visa allowing her to work in the U.S. for two more years:
Brown said Friday, as Alawieh was being detained at the airport, that there had been some “wrinkle” with her visa application that had been “relatively easy” to work out “because they did issue the visa, so whatever is going on is not the consequence of the actions at the American consulate, as far as I know.”
“She was clear to return. She had the visa, she had the right passport. Everything was looking good.”
Judge Sorokin has postponed the hearing originally scheduled for Monday, by one week.
Fabian Schmidt, a German green-card holder
Fabian Schmidt, a 34-year-old electrical engineer with a green card who lives in New Hampshire, was detained on March 7 when he flew into Logan airport in Boston after a trip to Europe. His mother alleges that he was “violently interrogated” for hours at the airport, pressured to give up his green card, and briefly hospitalized after collapsing. Schmidt was eventually transferred by ICE to the Wyatt Detention Center in Central Falls, Rhode Island, where he is still being held.
“These claims are blatantly false with respect to CBP,” Assistant Commissioner for Public Affairs Hilton Beckham said in a statement. “When an individual is found with drug-related charges and tries to reenter the country, officers will take proper action.” On X, Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin of the DHS called an account of Schmidt’s mistreatment “straight-up false.”
GPH reports that according to Schmidt’s mother, Astrid Senior, Schmidt had been charged with marijuana possession a decade ago:
Schmidt and his mother moved to the U.S. in 2007, and received green cards in 2008. He moved from California to New Hampshire in 2022. Senior described her son as a hardworking electrical engineer with a partner and 8-year-old daughter who are both U.S. citizens …
Schmidt had a misdemeanor charge for having marijuana in his car in 2015, which his mother said was dismissed after laws changed in California around marijuana possession. He missed a hearing about the case in 2022 since a notice was never forwarded to his new address. Senior mentioned that Schmidt is successfully recovering from alcoholism, and had a DUI that he’s completely worked through and paid off from around ten years ago.
On Monday, the German government announced that it was looking into the detention of three of its citizens by the U.S., including Schmidt and two German tourists (whose stories are included later in this post).
Ranjani Srinivasan, a Columbia University grad student from India
Ranjani Srinivasan, a 37-year-old Fulbright scholar from India, was informed on March 5 that her student visa had been revoked by the State Department after she was apparently targeted as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on Columbia students linked to the university’s pro-Palestinian protests. On March 7, ICE agents attempted to detain Srinivasan at her apartment, but her roommate refused to open the door. The New York Times reports:
In an interview, her roommate said that the agents had initially identified themselves as “police,” declined to provide their badge numbers, saying they feared they would be doxxed, and stood to the side of the door so that they were not visible through the peep hole. The roommate, a fellow Columbia student who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear for her safety, said that the building’s doorman, who is an immigrant, later told her that he had let the three agents into the building because he was frightened.
Srinivasan took a flight to Canada that night and was informed by Columbia the next day that her enrollment had been withdrawn since she was no longer legally allowed in the U.S. Her roommate again refused entry to ICE agents when they returned the next night. Several days later, they returned with a warrant and searched the apartment.
In a statement, DHS accused Srinivasan of being a Hamas supporter. After Srinivasan left the country, Secretary Kristi Noem of the DHS accused her of advocating for “violence and terrorism” and celebrated her “self-deportation.” The Times reports that DHS officials said she failed to disclose court summonses:
In response to questions, officials with the Homeland Security Department said that when Ms. Srinivasan renewed her visa last year, she failed to disclose two court summonses related to protests on Columbia’s campus. The department did not say how the summonses made her a terrorist sympathizer …
Ms. Srinivasan’s current situation can be traced back to last year, when she was arrested at an entrance to Columbia’s campus the same day that pro-Palestinian protesters occupied Hamilton Hall, a university building. She said she had not been a part of the break-in but was returning to her apartment that evening after a picnic with friends, wading through a churning crowd of protesters and barricades on West 116th Street, when the police pushed her and arrested her.
She was briefly detained and received two summonses, one for obstructing vehicular or pedestrian traffic and another for refusing to disperse. Her case was quickly dismissed and did not result in a criminal record, according to her lawyers and court documents. Ms. Srinivasan said that she never faced disciplinary action from the university and was in good academic standing.
She told the Times that she didn’t disclose the summonses in her visa-renewal form because the case had been dismissed. She also said that she had liked and shared pro-Palestinian posts on social media calling attention to “human-rights violations” in the war in Gaza.
Camila Muñoz, a Peruvian immigrant who recently married an American Trump voter
USA Today reports that Camila Muñoz and her new husband, Bradley Bartell, were recently broken apart by an Immigration agent at an airport checkpoint when they attempted to fly home to Wisconsin from their honeymoon in Puerto Rico:
Bartell and Muñoz wore their wedding rings for the flight home, secure in the knowledge that the U.S. government knew they had applied for her green card. She had overstayed her original visa but, they reasoned, she had been vetted from the start, worked on a W-2 and paid her taxes. Before agents led her away, Muñoz pulled off her wedding ring, afraid it might get confiscated. She shoved it into her backpack and handed it to Bartell. He shook as he watched her disappear. He thought, “What the f— do I do?”
They say Muñoz overstayed her visa in 2020 when COVID prevented her from being able to fly home. She’s now being detained at an ICE facility in Louisiana; it took Bartell almost a week to figure out where she was. He voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election and says he doesn’t understand why his wife, who doesn’t have a criminal record, was caught up in the president’s crackdown:
The money the couple saved for a down payment on a home has evaporated into attorneys fees and savings to pay a bond for her release, if she’s given that chance. Both of them have been thinking a lot about Bartell’s vote for Trump. “I knew they were cracking down,” he said. “I guess I didn’t know how it was going down.”
He imagined the administration would target people who snuck over the border and weren’t vetted. But his wife, “they know who she is and where she came from,” he said. “They need to get the vetting done and not keep these people locked up. It doesn’t make any sense.”
A 10-year-old Mexican American brain-cancer patient in Texas
Sometimes, citizens are affected too. NBC News reports that a 10-year-old U.S. citizen who had been living in Texas with her undocumented parents was recently removed from the country. The girl had been undergoing treatment for brain cancer in Houston; her family was detained while traveling to the city in February — and her parents were subsequently deported:
The family’s ordeal began last month, when they were rushing from Rio Grande City, where they lived, to Houston, where their daughter’s specialist doctors are based, for an emergency medical checkup. The parents had done the trip at least five other times in the past, passing through an immigration checkpoint every time without any issues, according to attorney Danny Woodward from the Texas Civil Rights Project, a legal advocacy and litigation organization representing the family. In previous occasions, the parents showed letters from their doctors and lawyers to the officers at the checkpoint to get through.
But in early February, the letters weren’t enough. When they stopped at the checkpoint, they were arrested after the parents were unable to show legal immigration documentation. The mother, who spoke exclusively to NBC News, said she tried explaining her daughter’s circumstances to the officers, but “they weren’t interested in hearing that.” …
The 10-year-old girl was diagnosed with brain cancer last year and underwent surgery to remove the tumor. Doctors “practically gave me no hope of life for her, but thank God she’s a miracle,” the mother said. The swelling on the girl’s brain is still not fully gone, the mother said, causing difficulties with speech and mobility of the right side of her body. Before the family was removed from the U.S., the girl was routinely checking in with doctors monitoring her recovery, attending rehabilitation therapies and taking medication to prevent convulsions.
Jessica Brösche, a German tourist held by ICE for more than six weeks
A 29-year-old tattoo artist from Berlin, Jessica Brösche was detained on January 25 after trying to enter the U.S. on foot with an American friend at the San Ysidro border crossing between Tijuana and San Diego. She had an ESTA (electronic system for travel authorization) permit for visa-free travel, but Immigration officers suspected she planned to work in the U.S., since she and her friend were traveling with tattoo equipment, and they reportedly suspected she had worked in the U.S. the last time she was in the country. Brösche was arrested and detained at the border crossing before eventually being transferred by ICE to the for-profit Otay Mesa Detention Center in California. She was held in U.S. custody for 46 days before finally being deported to Germany on March 12.
Brösche told ABC-10 News that she was held in solitary confinement at the facility for eight days. “It was horrible,” she said. (The company that operates Otay Mesa, CoreCivic, denied she was held “in any kind of restrictive housing for eight days” and denied solitary confinement existed at the facility.) It’s not clear why Brösche was detained for so long. A CBP spokesperson told ABC-10 that the agency will give anyone denied admission to the U.S. the option to book travel to their home country, but “if the foreign national is unable to do so, he or she will be turned over to the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” It’s also possible she got caught up in a federal backlog as the Trump administration attempted to ramp up is immigration enforcement.
Lucas Sielaff, a German tourist held by ICE for more than two weeks
Another German, 25-year-old Lucas Sielaff, was detained at the San Ysidro border crossing on February 14. He had obtained an ESTA and had a been visiting his American fiancée, Lennon Tyler, who lives in Las Vegas. She told reporters that they had traveled to Tijuana to obtain veterinary treatment for her dog. When they attempted to reenter the U.S., Tyler alleges that CBP officers became “very aggressive and hostile almost immediately.” Sielaff has told reporters that owing to the language barrier, he incorrectly answered a question about where he lived and officers accused him of living in Las Vegas rather than visiting. His ESTA was ultimately canceled, and he was handcuffed and arrested. “There was no proof that I overstayed anything,” he later told ABC-10 News.
Tyler told the New York Times that at the border crossing, after she tried to get answers about what was happening to her fiancée, she was subjected to a body search by ICE officers and was briefly chained to a bench.
Sielaff said he was held by CBP at the border for two days before being transferred by ICE to the for-profit Otay Mesa Detention Center, where he shared a cell with eight other people. He was held for a total of 16 days before returning to Germany on March 6. Per the Times, Tyler says he was only able to get out because “we made ourselves a nuisance”:
Dr. Tyler called the immigration authorities daily, she hired lawyers who also called them, she gave news media interviews and she reached out repeatedly to a German Consulate. [Eventually] Mr. Sielaff was allowed voluntary deportation, on a flight that cost him $2,744.
Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian entrepreneur held by ICE for 12 days
A 35-year-old Canadian entrepreneur attempted to enter to renew her work permit at the Mexican border and ended up detained for 12 days at two grim ICE facilities.
The details of her case are unusual. Jasmine Mooney, who once starred in a direct-to-video American Pie spinoff and more recently co-founded the American-based Holy Water! brand, said that while she was living in Vancouver, she discovered that her U.S. work permit had expired after three years. She decided to travel to Mexico to attempt to obtain a new permit at a San Ysidro border crossing, at which point her troubles began. The New York Times has a rundown of the complex logistics involved:
Ms. Mooney was applying for a TN visa, which allows professionals from Canada and Mexico to stay temporarily in the United States. She initially applied for one last year for her other marketing job, but she said that it had been rejected because the company’s letterhead was missing from her documents.
She said she had successfully reapplied about a month later at the San Ysidro border crossing, but when she tried to return to the United States at the end of November, a U.S. immigration official at the airport in Vancouver revoked her visa. He explained that her application had not been processed properly, she said, and raised concerns over one company that was employing her that sold hemp-based products.
Ms. Mooney said it was not uncommon for people like her who work in Southern California to apply for visas at the San Ysidro border station, so earlier this month, she figured she would try again.
Mooney says that rather than simply denying her entry, ICE agents detained her for unclear reasons, then moved her to an ICE prison in Southern California before transferring her to one in Arizona a few days later. She described bleak conditions at both facilities, describing her conditions to People as “inhumane” and feeling like a “deeply disturbing psychological experiment.” She describes being shackled for up to 24 hours in a row, sleeping on a mat with no blanket, having “aluminum foil wrapped over my body like a dead body for two and a half days,” among other indignities.
Mooney says she was freed without explanation, and is still unsure why she was detained in the first place. She described her ordeal more thoroughly in a first-person article published in The Guardian on Wednesday.
This post has been updated.
