Last week, an immigration judge denied bond to the wife and children of Mohamed Soliman, the man accused of attacking a June 2025 Boulder, Colorado rally “calling for the immediate release of the hostages held by Hamas.”
Prosecutors say Soliman lit and threw two Molotov cocktails at the Run for Their Lives group during their Boulder walk. Soliman told officers he learned of the rally after searching online for Zionist events. The attack killed a woman and injured 15 other people.
Soliman is facing dozens of federal charges, including 12 hate crime counts. But it might come as a surprise that Soliman’s wife and five children have also been held in a Texas detention facility for eight months, and ICE says they intend to deport them all, even though the family says it knew nothing about his plans.
Earlier this month, his 18-year-old daughter Habiba released a lengthy statement through her attorneys.
“We believe that what happened to the victims of the attack is dreadful,” it reads. “That no one ever should experience what they have experienced. Violence is never justified. And we condemn every one that uses violence including my father.”
The statement details harsh treatment from ICE and DHS:
“Just like other people, we were lied to by DHS and ICE agents. On the third day, they told us that staying in the hotel was dangerous and that we should go to another hotel for our safety. … We drove for an hour to Florence still believing that we were going to a hotel. To our surprise we arrived at a place in the middle of nowhere.”
“We drove into a garage and watched it close behind us. We felt trapped. We thought we got kidnapped. … The ICE agents didn’t show their badges or identify themselves at all until we got inside and saw the holding cells. They took our phones and all of our property, and we stayed for more than 8 hours in a cold cell. It was the beginning of the end.”
Habiba says the conditions at the facility have been terrible:
“We have been fighting and struggling to get the most basic things like food, medicine and even clothes. It was surprising to see the amount of heartless people that worked in the facility. … the truth is that only 10 percent of these officers have ever treated us like humans. … The officers talk arrogantly and treat the residents like they are nothing, as if just because we are detained, we are not humans anymore.”
“Their actions would be anywhere from eating lollipops and candy in front of the little kids, knowing that they all want some but can never get any.”
“Our whole day is spent running from one line to the next; they manage to keep us very busy waiting that by the end of the day, we have no energy left. … My brother himself had appendicitis, and when he went to the medical department, he wasn’t even seen by a doctor. … He was finally taken to actually be seen after he threw up in the waiting room and begged the nurse that he couldn’t even walk from the pain.”
The statement ends with Habiba calling for more people to oppose the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
“I don’t know when or how our detention will end,” she writes. “I don’t know if it’s a happy or a sad ending. I don’t know how we will deal with the effects that this place imposed on us. … But I know one thing: the truth never dies. We just need more people who are willing to spend the time and effort to find it.”
“I just hope that when the truth comes out that it is not too late and that the damage is fixable,” Habiba continues. “We are fighting because we know we are innocent. What happened is terrible, but there is no point in destroying the lives of six innocent humans. We pray for someone to look at us not as the family of a man who is accused of terrorism, but as humans who deserve to live freely.”
Momodou Taal detained
Momodou Taal, a student and activist who left the United States last year after his visa was revoked for participating in Gaza protests, says he was detained by British police at Heathrow Airport for six hours.
Taal says his phone and laptop were confiscated, and that authorities took a sample of his DNA. They asked him about “his childhood, mosque, Islamic preachers, and friends,” and if he had ever “read Karl Marx.”
Under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, British authorities can question anyone whom they believe is involved in the “current, emerging and future terrorist activity.”
“Full solidarity with you Momodou,” tweeted Electronic Intifada editor Asa Winstanley. “It’s the UK’s systemic abuse of its draconian Schedule 7 ‘counter-terror’ powers for political persecution that makes me extremely reluctant to travel anywhere right now. The ‘Terrorism Act’ is illegitimate and should be rescinded!”
Taal was suspended by Cornell University over his connections to the school’s Gaza solidarity encampment. He left the U.S. amid a lawsuit against Trump. He voluntarily left the country amid a lawsuit against the Trump administration.
“Given what we have seen across the United States, I have lost faith that a favourable ruling from the courts would guarantee my personal safety and ability to express my beliefs,” he wrote at the time. “I have lost faith I could walk the streets without being abducted. Weighing up these options, I took the decision to leave on my own terms.”
Further Reading
- Drop Site News: Eject Elbit Is Pushing Capital One to Drop $90M Loan to Israel’s Largest Weapons Manufacturer
- Common Dreams: ‘Confirming Everything We Knew Already’: Docs Show Trump Admin Targeted Gaza Activists for Their Opinions
- Inside Higher Ed: DHS Targeted Students for Protected Speech
- IMEU: What Alex Pretti Has to Do with Mahmoud Khalil
- My News LA: Judge Dismisses Lawsuit by Man Injured During UCLA Gaza War Protests
Further obscure reading for those history nerds intrigued by the question ‘what would Einstein make of the current situation’?:
In 2023 a new edition of “Einstein on Israel and Zionism” by Fred Jerome was published ( Avraham Burg writes a paragraph on introduction ) You can check out the book on Amazon but here’s another review:
…his views on Israel and Zionism were concealed and distorted for decades. Einstein on Israel and Zionism corrects the widely accepted story that Einstein was a major supporter and “champion” of the State of Israel––a fabrication told and retold primarily in the mainstream media….Einstein was a secular Jew, but he had mixed feelings about Zionism. Though he supported the goal of a Jewish “homeland” within Palestine, he never wavered from arguing forcefully for equal rights and equal power for the Arabs, whom he called “kinfolk” of the Jews. His nationalism had no room for aggressiveness or chauvinism. For him, the domination of Jew over Arab in Palestine, and the perpetuation of a state of mutual hostility between the two peoples, would mean the failure of Zionism…Drawing exhaustively from letters and statements, some of which had never before appeared in English, Fred Jerome presents and contextualizes Einstein’s writings on Palestine from 1919 until his death in 1955….Had the warnings of one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers been heeded, generations of death and destruction in Palestine might have been avoided.
Einstein on Israel and Zionism – Baraka Books
Einstein opposed Zionist colonization in Palestine and predicted the current catastropheHis views on Israel and Zionism were concealed and distorted for decades….
The idea of “the fate which will befall us” recurs often. In 1929, he seems to have already foreseen that the nation state that the Zionists dreamed of creating without “honest cooperation and honest pacts” with their Palestinian neighbors would become what it is today, namely the most dangerous place in the world for Jews to live.
Einstein opposed Zionist colonization in Palestine and predicted the current catastrophe – Canadian Dimension
Further viewing: yesterday the Guardian posted a 2.5 minute video titled “How Israel is planning to build an ‘apartheid road’ “:
“Israel plans to start work next month on a bypass that will close off the heart of the occupied West Bank to Palestinians and cement the de facto annexation of an area critical for the viability of a future Palestinian state. The road is a key part of the blueprint for a vast illegal new settlement in the E1 area east of Jerusalem, which would fragment the occupied West Bank. The far-right Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said the plans were intended to ‘bury the idea of a Palestinian state’”
How Israel is planning to build an ‘apartheid road’ – video | West Bank | The Guardian
At around 50 seconds in the video explains how the bypass road will force Israelis and West Bank Palestinians into different road systems, hence the label “apartheid road“. The video ends with this statement:
In the two years after Oct 7 ,2023, when the media and diplomatic attention was focused on the war in Gaza, Israeli soldiers and settlers killed over a thousand Palestinians there, 1 in 5 of them children.