A federal judge in Denver on Thursday ordered the deportation case for the wife and five children of Pearl Street Mall attack suspect Mohamed Soliman transferred to a court in Texas since the family is being held in that state.
Hayam El Gamal, 41, and her children were detained by federal immigration authorities on June 3, two days after police say Soliman used Molotov cocktails to attack more than a dozen people demonstrating on the Boulder pedestrian mall in support of Israeli hostages being held in Gaza.
Fifteen people and a dog were injured in what authorities described as an antisemitic terror attack.
Soliman, 45, is accused of planning the attack for more than a year and is charged with a federal hate crime and 118 state counts, including attempted murder and assault.
Federal officials, including the White House, used social media to announce the government would seek expedited removal to immediately send El Gamal and the children — two 4-year-old twins, and an 8-year-old, a 15-year-old and a 17-year-old — back to Egypt on June 3.
That prompted a family attorney to file for an injunction to stop the removal, and Judge Gordon Gallagher issued a temporary restraining order on June 4 to stop the government from deporting the family while the case makes its way through court.
The case should be transferred to the Western District of Texas because immigration officials took El Gamal and the five children from a federal facility in Florence and moved them to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Dilley, Texas, just hours after they were detained in Colorado, Gallagher wrote in Thursday’s order.
El Gamal and her children do not appear to qualify for expedited removal because they have been in the U.S. for more than two years and have pending immigration cases, Gallagher wrote. Soliman applied for asylum in September 2022 and El Gamal has applied for a work visa.
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Resolution introduced by Rep. Gabe Evans condemning antisemitic attack in Boulder passes in U.S. House In wake of recent attacks, Jewish community needs to fight urge to retreat (Opinion) Suspect in Boulder antisemitic terror attack charged with 118 counts including attempted murder Federal judge blocks deportation of Boulder attack suspect’s family Acts of antisemitism, like the Boulder attack, are normalized by the silence of too many leaders (Opinion)Federal officials now say El Gamal and her children do not qualify for expedited removal under the law and a standard removal process was “the plan all along,” despite the White House’s statements to the contrary, according to the ruling.
The temporary restraining order is still in effect until a 14-day limit expires next week or the Texas court orders otherwise, Gallagher wrote.
Eric Lee, a Michigan-based immigration lawyer representing El Gamal and her children, told The Denver Post on Thursday that the order is “a tentative victory” and he plans to continue fighting the case in Texas.
Gallagher could have closed the federal case and ordered it to proceed through immigration court, but instead upheld the restraining order, Lee said.
The family was “just as shocked as the rest of the country” by the June 1 attack and is now dealing with immense trauma, he said.
“There is absolutely no justification for detaining this family and we are doing everything we can to release them,” Lee said. “These are blatantly illegal efforts of the Trump administration to get the family out of the country for something they didn’t do.”
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