By Alan Gionet
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COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado (KCNC) — Supporters gathered in Colorado Springs, calling for the release of a mother and five children held in an ICE detention facility for seven months after the father of the family was charged with the Boulder terror attack.
Hayam El-Gamal and her children, ranging in ages from 5 to 18, remain at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. They have been there since soon after the June 1, 2025, attack on the Pearl Street Mall. The family is in the United States illegally, after overstaying visas, the government says.
The father of the family is Mohamed Soliman. Soliman remains accused of committing the firebombing attack on both state and federal charges. Specifically, he’s accused of throwing Molotov cocktails at marchers who were demonstrating in support of Israeli hostages in Gaza. One person, 82-year-old Karen Diamond, died. More than a dozen others were hurt.
After the attack, the White House posted on social media that the family had been arrested.
“They could be deported as early as tonight,” read a June 3, 2025, post on X.
Homeland Security Secretary Krisi Noem posted a video and wrote, “We are taking the family of alleged Boulder, Colorado terrorist and illegal alien Mohamed into ICE custody.”
“We are investigating to what extent his family knew about this heinous attack, if they had knowledge of it, or if they provided support to it,” Noem continued.
“We condemn the June 1st terrorist attack in Boulder. And we offer condolences for the victim’s family,” Alisha Oliveras said at the Monday news conference. “And we want to state clearly, we support the release of Hayam El-Gamal and her five children, ages five to 18.”
Oliveras considers herself a friend of the family whose child was friends with the oldest daughter, Habiba Soliman.
Habiba Soliman graduated from high school in Colorado Springs last year. She was honored by a local newspaper as one of the best and brightest graduates and was honored with an article that described her academic excellence and devotion to helping others.
“I was instantly impressed when I met Habiba,” Elizabeth Reinhold, a former teacher of Habiba’s and her siblings, said at the news conference. “She exuded a humble confidence and a quiet determination to learn and succeed in school. From the beginning, she told me she wanted to become a doctor in order to help people and make a difference in the world.”
The family’s youngest children are twins who were 4 years old and not yet in K-12 school at the time they were taken into custody.
The FBI declined to talk about its findings in its investigation into the family’s prior knowledge of the attack, telling CBS News Colorado that the only information being released in the case would have to come through the District Attorney’s Office or the court.
In the court case against Mohamed Soliman, an FBI agent was asked by an attorney, “They (the family) had no inkling at all that he was planning to do this or even thinking about doing anything like this?”
“That’s correct,” replied an FBI agent identified only as “Chan.”
From custody, Habiba recently wrote and shared a lengthy letter about the family’s situation. “We are six innocent people,” she wrote on Jan. 6. “Including 5-year-old twins—-trapped in a nightmare we didn’t create and punished for our father’s actions.”
The letter also raises complaints about the ICE facility run by contractor Core Civic and also shares what Habiba Soliman believes are injustices in their treatment.
“They chose not to investigate. They chose to ignore the results of the FBI investigation that shows we did not know anything,” Habiba wrote.
In a phone conversation from inside the detention center with CBS Colorado, Habiba said, “My father was the quietest person that you’d ever met. He speaks very, very few words. He’s a man of few words. My mother has always tried to get him to open up more.”
But she said he did not. He worked as a driver and slept in his car many nights, coming home about once a week. He would sleep a lot when home, she said.
“Nobody should ever experience what they experienced,” she said in the phone conversation about the alleged victims in the attack. “Nobody should ever go through what they went through. Violence is never justified. We don’t agree with violence at all for any reason. And we condemn all people that are violent. Even including my father.”
As the family has remained in ICE custody, there have been court appearances before an immigration judge. In September, a judge ordered the family released on bond, awaiting further proceedings. The judge deemed the mother and children as neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community. ICE has appealed and refuses to release the family while they appeal.
The family has roots in Egypt, but Habiba and her two sisters and two brothers were raised in Kuwait, where they were born. Then the family came to the United States on a visa, Habiba explained over the phone. She said they believed that if they applied for asylum, they could stay after seeing they had the right to file on a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website.
“So we thought that, because of this, we are staying here legally. I mean, we got the work permits and the social security numbers. We thought that everything was legal. We would never, ever have stayed here if we had known that we were breaking the law or that was wrong or anything.”
But they did.
Supporters of the family are upset that the government continues to hold the mother and children.
“I have faith in the justice system of America,” Reinhold said. “I have faith that Habiba will be allowed to pursue her dream as a doctor, somehow, somewhere. I ask that these children be treated as innocent until proven guilty.”
In an interview with CBS Colorado, Brandon Rattiner, senior director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Colorado, said, “Anti-semetism often takes the form of collective blaming. So this is something our community understands really well, which is why we remain committed to making sure that everybody has a fair process. That rules like due process and civil liberties are respected all throughout the justice system.”
Rattiner added, “One of the reasons that I wanted to do this interview is to make that point clear that our community is nuanced enough to understand that we were victims of pain. But that doesn’t change the way that anybody should be treated under American law.”
The family has another bond hearing in immigration court scheduled for Wednesday, Jan. 21.
CBS Colorado reached out to ICE multiple times over the past week and a half, asking for comment on the custody situation for Hayam El-Gamal and her children, but has not received a reply.
Core Civic, the contractor that runs the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Dilley, Texas, said all questions about the facility should be directed to ICE, but did say, “It is important to know that all of our facilities, including DIPC, are subject to multiple layers of oversight and are monitored very closely by our government partners to ensure full compliance with policies and procedures, including any applicable detention standards.”
Habiba had hopes of attending Harvard Medical School. Right now, she and her mother and siblings wait.
“It’s just very, very hard, and what makes it harder is that we don’t know when the truth is going to come out. We believe that it will come out. We believe that we’re innocent. We have nothing to fear from the law. It’s just a matter of time, but unfortunately, it’s taking forever, and it’s affecting us every day,” she said. “We still believe that the truth will come out. That we will be treated fairly.”
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