Judge says Trump cannot swiftly deport family of Boulder attack suspect

Article content

A federal judge in Colorado on Thursday said in a ruling that the Trump administration cannot rapidly deport the family of an Egyptian man charged with attacking a gathering in Boulder held in support of the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza.

U.S. District Judge Gordon P. Gallagher had previously blocked federal officials from removing Hayam El Gamal, the suspected attacker’s wife, and the couple’s five children from the country. He had also barred officials from taking the family out of the judicial district, but by then officers had sent El Gamal and the children to a family detention facility in Texas.

In a 15-page decision, Gallagher said he would transfer the case, with his orders temporarily barring deportation in place, to federal court in Texas for a decision about whether the family should be released from detention.

He wrote that if the Trump administration had carried out its threats to swiftly deport El Gamal and the children to Egypt, they “likely would have violated Ms. El Gamal’s and her children’s due process rights.”

The government is “constitutionally obligated” to handle proceedings fairly, he wrote. “It therefore was and remains necessary to halt immediate deportation until the situation is figured out – to measure twice and cut once,” he wrote in the decision.

The White House had no immediate response to the decision.

Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, has been charged with a federal hate crime and state counts of attempted murder stemming from the Boulder attack, which injured at least a dozen people. He is accused of injuring people at a demonstration held June 1, with authorities alleging in court filings that Soliman used “a makeshift blowtorch” to set people on fire.

Immigration officers arrested his wife and children on June 3, and the White House tweeted that day that “They could be deported as early as tonight.”

Instead, according to the judge’s ruling, officers drove them roughly two hours from Florence, Colorado, to the airport in Denver and put them on a plane to San Antonio that night, arriving shortly before midnight. The family arrived at the detention facility in the city of Dilley after 2 a.m. local time.

Officials said the family had been placed into expedited removal, a fast-track process that does not involve a full hearing.

In his decision, Gallagher wrote that federal law limits the fast-track process to migrants who have been in the United States for less than two years. The family arrived more than two years ago.

According to court documents, Soliman moved to Colorado Springs three years ago and lived there with his wife and children. Soon after the attack, federal authorities said they had taken his family into custody, revoked their visitor visas and were expediting their deportation from the country. The Trump administration has also said they overstayed their visas, though they had applied for asylum in hopes of getting permanent refuge in the U.S.

Immigration and criminal defense lawyers said they could not recall similar examples of entire families facing deportation hearings right after a relative was charged with a crime.

In court filings, El Gamal was described as “shocked to learn” that her husband had been arrested in connection with the Boulder attack.

“Mr. Soliman has not been convicted of any crime and retains the presumption of innocence until proven guilty,” attorneys wrote in a filing. “In any event, it is patently unlawful to punish individuals for the crimes of their relatives.”

The court papers said El Gamal and her children entered the U.S. in 2022 with visitor visas. The children are Egyptian citizens, while El Gamal is an Egyptian national born in Saudi Arabia, the filings said. The court documents describe El Gamal as a network engineer. Soliman filed an asylum application that had remained pending, with El Gamal and the children listed as dependents on it, the lawyers said in a June 3 filing.

The Trump administration wrote in court papers that “El Gamal and her children are being lawfully detained based on their own unlawful conduct, namely, unlawfully overstaying their visas,” rather than being punished for Soliman’s alleged acts.

According to a Wednesday filing from Justice Department attorneys, El Gamal and her children had been allowed to stay in the country until Feb. 26, 2023, under their visas. Instead, the filing said, they remained in the U.S.

After immigration agents took El Gamal and her children into custody, they were moved to an immigration detention facility in Dilley because it was suited to house families, the federal filing said.

Federal officials acknowledged that the family’s immigration status “came to light by virtue of her husband’s terrorist’s attack” but said that was not a defense against being detained or removed from the country. They also said El Gamal and her children were being held lawfully “because they have been placed in removal proceedings.”