Community members gathered at Colorado Springs City Hall Sunday to ask for the release of the Soliman family – Hayam El-Gamal and her five children, aged 18 to five – from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention. The family, citizens of Egypt, immigrated to the U.S. from Kuwait in 2022 with B-1 visas. According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), they filed for asylum on September 29, 2022. The Soliman family settled in Colorado Springs. Habiba Soliman, the eldest daughter, graduated high school in 2025 and was awarded The Gazette’s “Best and Brightest” scholarship.
Mohamed Sabry Soliman, the father, threw Molotov cocktails at people marching in support of Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza on June 1, 2025, in Boulder. Fifteen people were injured, and one 84-year-old woman later died of the injuries she received in the attack. Days after the incident, Soliman’s family – his wife and five children – were detained by ICE and have remained in custody.
The family is being held at the ICE detention center in Dilley, Texas, run by private prison operator CoreCivic. The family has raised concerns about conditions at the facility, such as inadequate food and medical care.
“This place is both mentally and physically devastating for all human beings, but especially for children,” a community member said, reading a statement from El-Gamal’s 16 year-old son. “We’re just asking for one thing: to be treated like an innocent family. Children should not be punished for their parents’ actions, and five children have already waited too long. Please don’t let our lives, health, and sanity be lost behind these gates. Set us free so we can do our immigration process while having our freedom. We respect the law and will follow it, but please just stop torturing us by keeping us here.”
Hope Forti, an advocate for El-Gamal and her children, compared her child’s experiences with those of the detained children. “I want to compare my innocent daughter’s last 324 days with the innocent five-year-old El-Gamal twins and their last 324 days,” she said. “My daughter has been able to play outdoors for over a thousand hours in the last 324 days. These twins have logged now 20% of their lives, including their fifth birthdays, and counting, in prison. My daughter, Mercy, sent her doll to the doll hospital for an arm repair last week, and the twins saw their teddy bear in storage at the facility and asked for it. The guard said no. Mercy ate meals made from scratch with both of her grandmas. The twins are eating gruel – boiled chicken with no seasoning, mushy frozen vegetables and fruit – try that on your five year-old. Finding mold and worms in their food. Somehow the children of the family were able to receive one singular banana this entire time. They each savored one bite of the banana and they told us that that was the best treat they’ve had the entire time. My daughter brings home three drawings from school every week. She writes in her kindergarten handwriting, ‘Mom, you’re the best. Dad, I miss you. Max, I love you.’ The twins are drawing pictures, which you’ve seen famously in national news now, of themselves behind bars, saying, let us out. My daughter, a few weeks ago, came home from kindergarten telling me someone wanted to be her BFF, and she said, ‘Nobody’s ever asked me that before.’ The twins turned five in prison have not attended one day of kindergarten. We were finally allowed to send them school books after nine months of attempting to.”
ICE has responded to reporting on the conditions at the Dilley facility. “The Dilley facility is a family residential center designed specifically to house family units together in a safe, structured and appropriate environment,” said ICE Director Todd M. Lyons in a Feb. 25 news release. “What’s important for people to remember is that ICE detains to deport – so detention is not punitive, and Dilley is not a ‘correctional center’ or anything like that. It’s a place where families who have been in the U.S. illegally can get medical care, educational services, recreational opportunities and essential daily living needs while they await deportation.”
Colorado Springs community members recently drove 13 hours to Dilley to visit the family in-person, and they dispute the claims made by Lyons. “Despite what CoreCivic and DHS says, there is no education happening at that facility,” said Megan O’Rear, a local educator who visited the El-Gamal family last month. “These kids want to learn, and they are being denied that as well. Even the 16-year-old boy talked to me about whether or not he will be able to graduate high school.”
O’Rear said the children are unable to sleep due to CoreCivic policies. “One of the daughters explained to us about how they never turn the lights out and so she would cover up the light with a pillowcase so that she could try to sleep and in the middle of the night the guards would just come and rip the pillowcase down and say, ‘We need to see you at all times,’” she said. “That kind of psychological terror for a child, just all of a sudden felt so much more nefarious than watching a guard with a gun walk by.”
Alexandria Newton also recently visited the family and confirmed the psychological impact of detention. “My husband and I went down there and visited them last weekend,” she said. “I am a clinical social worker. I did some basic mental health screening with them. About 2.8% of people score in the severe range of a depression screen generally, and all of them scored in that severe range … children are traumatized like that.”
In addition to the psychological impact, Kristi Gutzman, another local educator who travelled with O’Rear, raised concerns about medical care for Hayam. “A week ago, Friday, she was finally taken to the emergency room,” she said. “Her pain, she was reading as 11 out of 10. She has been asking for help with this pain for months. They have done X-rays and at the same time they’re doing X-ray of a lump that’s been growing on her chest … When they finally took her to the emergency room over a week ago, scans showed fluid around her heart. The medical facility recommended an ultrasound and the guards with her, the ICE agents, refused to let her have that medical follow-up. So they took her back, in pain, to the facility and have still not followed up with any of the concerns about ulcers and infection.”
Advocates are urging community members to contact members of the Department of Homeland Security Oversight Committee, as well as Rep. Jeff Crank (R-CO), in order to intercede on behalf of the family.
