All Imam Ayman Soliman wanted to do was lead the handful of Muslim inmates in his block at the Butler County Jail in one of their daily prayers. All his previous guards had allowed it, but the one on duty the night of Aug. 2 told him no.
A back and forth ensued. The Cincinnati imam and former children’s hospital chaplain repeatedly asked for an explanation. The guard was obstinate in refusing to provide one. After Soliman headed to the phone room to call his contact person and complain, around a half-dozen people came in the room and seized him.
“One of them had a gun, and he said it was very scary,” said Rev. Judy Ragsdale, a Cincinnati clergy member who Soliman recounted his transfer into segregated detention to during her visit with him on Aug. 7, the day after he was removed from restrictive custody.
Earlier this month, Soliman filed a second habeas petition seeking his immediate release from the Butler County Jail, where he has been held since July 9 after being detained during a routine checkup at the Homeland Security office in Blue Ash, Ohio. A beloved member of the greater Cincinnati community — in part due to his previous interfaith chaplaincy at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital — Soliman’s arrest has spawned protests, including clashes with police, and led to the firings of other Cincinnati Children’s chaplains who spoke out on his behalf. Last week, a federal judge extended the temporary restraining order barring his movement from within the jurisdiction of the Southern District of Ohio until Aug. 27 to consider the petition.
A lawyer for Soliman said that, while filing the petition was standard procedure, it includes new claims about Soliman’s placement in segregated detention from Aug. 2 to Aug. 5 — a “result,” it states, “of targeted harassment.”
Soliman was denied access to counsel, visitation and religious materials, as well as the right to freely practice his faith, the suit claims.
Reached by phone, an officer at the Butler County Jail declined to comment.
The experience, compounded by the month spent in jail following the revocation of his asylum status in June and arrest in July, has taken a noticeable toll on his mental health, friends of Soliman told Salon.
Before his experience in confinement, Soliman remained “calm,” pensive and an attentive listener, Ahmed Elkady, one of Soliman’s close friends, collaborators at the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati and designated contact person while he’s in custody, said in an interview. But his speech quickened while in isolation. He began talking “very fast,” not allowing others to speak, “as if he [wanted] to throw information at us because he knows his time is limited.”
“You can feel the anxiety in his tone,” said Elkady, who serves as a board member of the mosque. “Before the court hearing [on Aug. 12], I was talking to him, and I felt like he was very upset — very angry — because he feels there is something wrong.” Soliman’s having a hard time accepting that he can’t support his community as fervently as he did just two months ago, especially as Cincinnatians fight for his release, he said.
Soliman is far from the only immigrant to have such an experience. As the Trump administration has ramped up its efforts to curb immigration — by critics’ assessment going far beyond his initial promise of deporting violent criminals within the country’s borders — immigrants with and without legal status have had their lives upended, their statuses suddenly revoked or challenged before facing arrests and monthslong detentions in centers far from home, all with the threat of deportation or sudden removal to a third country looming.
Take the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whose lawyers said he endured torture at El Salvador’s notorious CECOT megaprison after the government wrongly removed him to the Central American country. Or, as Elkady noted in his interview with Salon, the cases of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian Columbia University student and greencard holder Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested earlier this year and transfered to a Louisiana detention center before a court ordered his release more than 100 days later, and Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University student, originally from Turkey, who was arrested by plainclothes ICE agents in March and held in a processing facility for 45 days. Soliman’s circumstances are yet another example, Elkady said, adding that he hopes the imam will also be freed like Khalil and Öztürk.
Soliman’s case also sets a critical precedent in the nation’s immigration policy for people granted legal status, his lawyer, Robert Ratliff, told Salon in July.
The importance of this case is that “if allowed to stand, the United States government will be able to retroactively say, ‘Hey, we’ve reevaluated based on some articles that we found on the internet, and we’re revoking your status. And while we revoke it, you get to wait in jail’” to any immigrant it has ever granted legal status, Ratliff said. “That’s what’s at stake here.”
In court filings, the government has claimed that he’s supplied material support to the Muslim Brotherhood, which an asylum officer designated a terrorist organization during a review of his case, and accused of “murder and terrorism related activities” in Iraq based on three outstanding warrants, according to the petition.
Lawyers and friends of Soliman deny those claims, adding that they’re baseless and rely on claims taken from articles on the Muslim Brotherhood that the reports’ authors have refuted. Plus, they say, Soliman has never even traveled to Iraq.
Ragsdale previously told Salon that Soliman has fashioned himself into a de facto chaplain in the jail, offering spiritual counsel to detainees in his block when he can, advocating for them to receive halal and kosher meals, in accordance with their faith; leading prayers regularly; and asking his network on the outside to source Qurans for Muslim inmates who needed them.
That all stopped the night he was taken from his room, she said. After interviews with him and the guard on duty, the jail determined the imam was in the wrong, Soliman told Ragsdale. While in isolation, he received only one hour where he was free to call his counsel and other contacts — between midnight and 1 a.m. — and leave his cell. He slept poorly, notching only a few hours per night, in part because of a noisy cellmate, who he said appeared to be in crisis, reading aloud, repeatedly flushing the toilet all night and threatening to harm him.
“He said it was just — it was a horrible, horrible experience,” Ragsdale said, adding that it sends a message that “you do not stand up for your rights in jail because this could happen.”
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While Soliman was initially slated to remain in segregated detention for some 20 days, he was released early. The threat that he could return to restrictive custody, however, remains, according to the lawsuit.
Asked how he feels seeing Soliman face this immigration action, Elkady referenced his faith. The battle for his release and asylum status is a “big test” that the imam is going through, “and usually the people who face huge tests are people who have a higher level in the eyes of God.” Soliman has become a brother to him over the four years they’ve known each other, he added, and he believes in and trusts in him so much he was willing to sponsor Soliman’s bond should the court have granted it.
He underscored the difference in their immigration stories. They’re both from Egypt, Elkady said, but, while he came to the U.S. as a college student in 2001 and followed a steady path to citizenship, Soliman’s work as a journalist covering the Arab Spring in 2013 has not only made his fate much more uncertain, but placed his life at greater risk should his case end in deportation.
“Ayman, he is the one who fled Egypt escaping a nightmare,” Elkady said. “For me, I was coming here to build a dream, but his goal is escaping the nightmare.”
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