Judge halts deportation of Colorado suspect's family

BBC News

a day ago

A US judge has temporarily halted deportation proceedings against the family of a man accused of Sunday's petrol-bomb attack on Jewish demonstrators in Boulder, Colorado.Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, is accused of a federal hate crime and other charges. Officials say his family, who are not charged in the attack, are Egyptian citizens.US District Judge Gordon Gallagher, a Biden appointee, ordered deportation proceedings to be halted, a day after the White House said it had six one-way tickets to deport the wife and five children from the US. The decision was one of three immigration rulings on Wednesday against Trump by federal judges as he seeks to deliver on his pledge for mass deportations.
"The court finds that deportation without process could work irreparable harm and an order must issue without notice due to the urgency this situation presents," Judge Gallagher wrote in his order on Wednesday.Lawyers for the defence had accused the government of unfairly targeting the family, who say they were unaware of Mr Soliman's violent plans and have co-operated with investigators. "It is patently unlawful to punish individuals for the crimes of their relatives," the family's lawyers said in a lawsuit challenging their immigration detention. "Such methods of collective or family punishment violates the very foundations of a democratic justice system."The family members include Mr Soliman's wife, Hayam El Gamal, 41, as well as the couple's 17-year-old daughter, two other daughters and two sons. They are being held at an immigration detention centre in Texas, over 900 miles (1,450km) from their home in Colorado.Department of Homeland Security officials have said that Mr Soliman arrived in the US on a tourist visa in August 2022. That visa expired the following year. He made an asylum claim in September 2022.According to police documents, the suspect told officials that he "never talked to his wife or his family" about his plans, and that he had left a phone in a desk drawer with messages to his wife and children. His wife turned the phone in to authorities.One of Mr Soliman's daughters was recently awarded a scholarship by a local newspaper in Colorado Springs. A profile in the Gazette newspaper noted she "was born in Egypt but lived in Kuwait for 14 years" and relocated to the US two years ago.After his arrest, Mr Soliman told police he planned the attack to take place after his daughter's high school graduation, according to the FBI.On Wednesday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the agency was "investigating to what extent his family knew about this heinous attack, if they had knowledge of it, or if they provided support to it".The judge's order is the latest setback for the Trump administration on immigration.On Wednesday, another federal judge ruled that over 100 Venezuelan migrants deported to a jail in El Salvador must be given a chance to challenge their removal. Judge James Boasberg said the US had "plainly deprived" the migrants of their constitutional right to oppose their detention.But the ruling does not apply Venezuelan migrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran native deported from the US at the same time.It also emerged on Wednesday that the US had flown a Guatemalan man back to the US, after deporting him to Mexico. A federal judge in Boston last month found that prosecutors had incorrectly declared the man was not afraid for his safety in Mexico. The individual, identified in court papers only as OCG, was returned on a commercial flight on Wednesday, according to his lawyers.