Tala Ali wasn’t expecting him not to come back. Yes, she had driven her fellow Clifton Mosque board member, Imam Ayman Soliman, to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Blue Ash, Ohio, for his appointment the morning of July 9. Yes, they were prepared for the possibility that he wouldn’t walk back out of that building; a small team of 15 Cincinnati clergy and three state legislators had accompanied them in case they would need to mobilize.
But his lawyers said it was just supposed to be a regular check-in. He was supposed to come back — he should have.
“We took him in,” Ali, chair of the Clifton Mosque, told Salon. “We hoped for the best, but we were strategized for the worst.”
After nearly four hours of waiting outside the office, the worst came to pass.
It’s been nearly two weeks since ICE detained the revered imam and former interfaith chaplain at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, and the city has been left reeling since. Righteous outcry has turned into an outpouring of support, spawning a flurry of demonstrations across the city, open letters, crowdfunding campaigns and lawmaker interventions as residents appeal for his release.
Soliman’s detention is one of the latest to catapult into the national spotlight, seen by critics as another example of how the Trump administration’s aggressive effort to effect mass deportations has led to ICE agents snatching up immigrants with little to no warning, ripping apart families, communities and, in this case, workplaces. His immigration story also isn’t much unlike any other asylum seeker’s: He fled his home country of Egypt in 2014 after his documentation of student protests against the military-backed government as a freelance journalist landed him in jail multiple times over, where he was subjected to beatings and torture for days at a time.
Soliman is far from the only victim of ICE’s enforcement actions across the tri-state area, Ali told Salon. Indeed, she was unavailable for a previously scheduled interview because she had to respond to an SOS call about an ICE sighting in a Cincinnati neighborhood. Soliman, she said, is just one target with enough support from enough of the right people to ensure his story is told.
“I’ve talked to congregants at Muslim mosque that say, ‘If they can come after him, they can come after any of us,’ and not only can they come after any of us, they have been coming after us,” Ali said. Soliman’s detention has “shaken” everyone.
“I don’t know where Ayman got the time, the human capacity, to be there for so many and on such a deep level, but he did,” she added. “That’s why we have so many standing up right now.”
Judith Ragsdale, a now-retired senior director of pastoral care at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital who hired Soliman four years ago, can attest to that. She told Salon that when she opened his resume she cried because of how “perfect” he was for the chaplaincy role she sought to fill: a faith leader who could both attend to patients in the newborn intensive care unit and serve Muslim patients in the hospital’s Cancer and Blood Diseases Institute.
“Ayman has made a profound difference for staff and certainly for the families in walking families through what is Islamically allowed around end of life,” she said in a phone interview. He stayed late at the hospital, caring for patients inside and outside of his units and faith, she said. “He is one of the just rarest finds in the country around chaplaincy.”
Ragsdale had visited Soliman at the Butler County Jail last week, speaking with him for just 13 minutes via video call before it cut them off. He told her that he was scared about being detained, but that he and the other inmates were supporting each other. He said he’s begun teaching a curious guard about Islam, held the jail’s first Jumu’ah, or Friday prayer for Muslim detainees, ensured they had access to kosher meals and has even been asked to return to the jail as a chaplain if and when he’s released.
“That is Ayman Soliman in a nutshell,” Ragsdale said. “He said that Allah had given him such a sense of peace and that this is part of Allah’s plan. And I can tell you, I have been very afraid for him, and I left the jail feeling far more at peace than I have felt for the last week.” But she still worries.
“I feel very, well … just heart sick about what lays before so many people who don’t have his level of support, and what could actually happen to him,” she said.
A spokesperson for Cincinnati Children’s Hospital told Salon that it does not comment on former or current personnel.
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Soliman entered the United States in March 2014 on a tourist visa, and applied for asylum with U.S. Immigration and Citizenship Services in early February of 2015, court documents show. He was granted asylum in 2018 under the first Trump administration, and he soon sought a green card.
But his permanent residency application stalled into the Biden administration. Complicating matters were a series of lawsuits Soliman filed against the government beginning in 2022 over an FBI flag that came up during a background check for a chaplain job with the Oregon Department of Corrections; after sending his fingerprints to the state police to show he didn’t pose a risk, he was told they didn’t match the FBI flag. More than six years later, Soliman has yet to receive a green card.
“I didn’t come to America seeking a better life. It was escaping death.”
“Going back to Egypt for me is a death sentence,” he said in an interview with Ohio state Rep. Munira Abdullahi, D, in the moments prior to his ICE check-in earlier this month, a somber look flashing on his face. “I didn’t come to America seeking a better life. It was escaping death.”
Robert Ratliff, a lawyer for Soliman, told Salon that the imam received a notice of the government’s intent to revoke his asylum status in December 2024, more than a decade after his arrival in the U.S. Soliman’s status — and, subsequently, his work authorization — was officially revoked last month after an asylum officer, by way of “three or four levels of assumptions,” accused him of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and deemed him ineligible for asylum, Ratliff said.
That officer, Ratliff said, labeled a national charitable organization Soliman was affiliated with while in Egypt, Al-Jameya al Shareya, a Tier III terrorist group last year despite the U.S. government never designating it as such. The organization had provided support to the Muslim Brotherhood, the officer alleged, also labeling the group a Tier III foreign terrorist organization despite the U.S. not formally determining it as such. In 2013, a military coup led by current authoritarian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, now a close U.S. ally, ousted Egypt’s first democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi, who was affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Because Soliman had served as a board member for a local chapter of Al-Jameya al Shareya — a fact he disclosed in his initial asylum application — the officer then claimed he also had provided material support for the Muslim Brotherhood and was, thus, not eligible for asylum. Soliman and his lawyers, however, deny that claim.
“We believe strongly that Mr. Soliman has provided a very solid asylum claim,” Ratliff said, noting that the asylum officer never touched Soliman’s underlying asylum grant in their decision to terminate.
“That still exists,” Ratliff added. “The original finding that he did fear for his life and safety and was being persecuted in Egypt — that was not part of the termination.”
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told Salon in a statement that immigrants, even if they have lawful status or a pending application, are “not shielded from immigration enforcement action.”
“USCIS is responsible for administering America’s lawful immigration system, ensuring the integrity of the immigration process, and protecting the interests of the American people by screening and vetting aliens,” the spokesperson said.
USCIS, however, does not discuss the details of individual immigration cases, the spokesperson added.
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In the days after his arrest, Soliman’s lawyers filed an emergency petition in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio to make sure he would not be moved from within the Cleveland Immigration Court’s jurisdiction to a facility in another state or deported, as has been the case for other ICE detainees amid the Trump administration’s crackdown. The court granted the request last week, issuing a temporary restraining order.
Soliman has an initial appearance and bond hearing slated for July 22. The interfaith leader, Ratliff said, is approaching his current circumstances with a positive outlook, motivated in large part by his faith and the backing he’s received from his community.
The support people have shown, he said, will also help during his bond hearing, where a Cleveland Immigration Court judge will consider Soliman’s ties to the community in determining whether to release him.
“The injustice is the worst part, but the helplessness in the face of it is — it’s a lot of moral struggle.”
And he has plenty of those ties, according to a longtime colleague of Soliman, who requested anonymity out of fear of losing their job. Social media has been flooded with posts and comments about Soliman’s impact on the families he’s served and staff he’s helped deliver quality care at Cincinnati Children’s. Because of how dedicated, “centered,” faithful and “steady” he is, losing him to immigration enforcement is hard for the community to bear, the colleague said.
“The helplessness is what a lot of the community [members] are hurting from,” they said. “The injustice is the worst part, but the helplessness in the face of it is — it’s a lot of moral struggle.”
That’s why people are clamoring for anything they can do to make a difference, spawning a massive response. A crowdfunding campaign organized by the Ohio Immigrant Alliance has raised more than half of its $100,000 goal from 684 donors as of Monday afternoon. A petition seeking his release from ICE detention has received nearly 4,000 signatures, and at least two open letters of support from local clergy and healthcare workers have circulated, garnering hundreds of signatures each.
U.S. Rep. Greg Landsman, D-Ohio, as well as Democratic state Reps. Rachel Baker and Karen Brownlee, and Cincinnati Vice Mayor Jan-Michele Kearney voiced support for Soliman and worked to guarantee his right to due process in court. Meanwhile, several organizations, including University of Cincinnati student groups he’s volunteered for, across the state have denounced his detention and called for his release.
Community members have also held a handful of demonstrations outside the Butler County Jail and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in the days since his detention. Last Thursday, an evening protest and march for Soliman across the Roebling Bridge connecting Cincinnati and northern Kentucky erupted in chaos as police deployed force — at times, punching demonstrators and pulling them to the ground — to get them to disperse. Local news outlets reported that police arrested more than a dozen people.
Ali, the Clifton Mosque chair, told Salon that she’s received calls from Soliman every day, sometimes multiple times a day. He always opens with checking on her and her family, particularly her sibling who’s undergoing treatment for cancer, and she touches base with him about the advocacy she’s coordinating around his case.
By now, he’s gone over a week without his medication, which she’s working to get for him. They speak at length about his fears that Arabic language press could pick up on his current circumstance, that his detention could impact his family in Egypt, that Egyptian officials could learn information that they could use against him should he be removed from the U.S.
She takes care to update him on the groundswell of support he’s receiving from the outside, like the hundreds of demonstrators rallying for his release or the call she received from someone Soliman helped during a mental health crisis who said they wouldn’t be alive if not for him. That part of the call, she said, always stuns him into silence.
“He just says, ‘I really didn’t expect this much support. Please keep letting people know how grateful I am, how much I appreciate it,’” Ali recalled. “‘You really have brought me comfort. I feel better,’ is what he says.”
He also tells her of the spiritual support he receives on the inside and shares with his fellow detainees, and how it’s also helped him keep faith.
“We have a thing in our tradition, ‘Wherever God plants you, bloom,’” Ali said, “and that’s what he’s doing.”
