The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
With no warning last Friday, a former Cincinnati Children’s Hospital chaplain was released after a 72-day stay in the Butler County Jail.
It appears that immigration officials concluded that they didn’t have a case for revoking Ayman Solimon’s status as a refugee. That’s what his lawyers and his many defenders had been saying all along.
“How they came to this conclusion, no one knows,” Soliman said in a phone interview Monday evening. “There was no case. It was an act of retaliation. It was an ungrounded, baseless case.”
Even so, the attempt to deport the Egyptian asylee ignited a national uproar. It also sparked a protest march to which police reacted and arrested two journalists who tried to cover the march.
Soliman fled Egypt in 2014 after being detained by the government four times and tortured on one of those occasions, he said.
As a tour guide under the regime of autocrat Hosni Mubarek, Soliman said he was arrested for his dissident political views.
Authorities applied electroshocks, beat him and put out cigarettes on his naked body, according to Soliman. They took him to an open courtyard in winter, stripped him to his underwear and doused him in cold water. They deprived him of food, water and sleep. They hung him by his arms, which were behind his back.
“This was all extrajudicial punishment,” Soliman said.
Mubarek was deposed during the 2011 Arab Spring uprising. Soliman worked as a journalist during that time, as a freelance producer for international news organizations, and on a documentary.
Representing the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Morsi was elected president in 2012. But the military seized power the following year. Soliman again found himself in the crosshairs of the authorities.
“After the military coup, I was abducted off the street as I was going to cover some protests opposing the coup against the elected president,” he said. “For three days they told me I was a criminal and I was a traitor working for a foreign agency. I was a journalist. I had my credentials. It was not a crime. But of course they accused every independent journalist of being a traitor working for a foreign power that was working to destabilize the great country of Egypt.”
Never having been the object of an official proceeding by the government, Soliman was able to go to Chicago in 2014 to study documentary filmmaking. He initially planned on returning to Egypt, thinking the military government would be short-lived.
But after a government raid on his Egyptian home and seeing multiple journalists abducted and disappeared, Soliman decided to apply for asylum. It was granted in 2018.
That asylum was suddenly revoked on June 3 over alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, which the United States has not designated a terrorist group, though Trump and Republicans in Congress are pushing to do so.
“They claimed that I volunteered with a charitable organization in Egypt — it was one of the most trusted and reputable organizations in Egypt — and they said it might be linked to the Muslim Brotherhood,” Soliman said. “Even if it was linked to the Muslim Brotherhood — which is not true — it’s not listed as a terrorist organization in the U.S.”
After the cancellation of a July 3 hearing in immigration court, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Soliman on July 9 and took him to Butler County Jail in Hamilton. The jail, along with a number of others in Ohio, has a contract to house people detained by ICE under President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation effort.
Soliman said he was treated poorly. But then, so was everyone.
“It’s a jail,” he said. “ICE detainees shouldn’t be there. We are not criminals. They applied the same rules to us as they applied to the other offenders. It’s just dehumanizing.”
But much more than that, he was scared what would happen if attempts to revoke his refugee status were successful and he was sent back to Egypt.
“In some ways, it was as scary as what happened in Egypt because if I was deported, it could be torture and death,” he said. “So for me, it wasn’t just about being in jail, it was about the consequences. For me deportation could be death.”
As Soliman sat in jail, his legal team and others poked holes in the case to revoke his asylum. Two academics said their work was misrepresented by federal authorities who tried to use it to support their claim that Soliman was connected to terrorists. His lawyers pointed to what they said were false, shifting reasons the government used to hold their client in jail.
Finally, the government appeared to capitulate on Friday when it released Soliman.
“The trial was coming up next week and I think it was going to be pretty ugly for the government,” said Lynn Tramonte, founder of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance. “It was pretty gory what happened to him in Egypt. He was tortured. All those details were going to be repeated. The government didn’t really have a case. They didn’t have any specific accusations of bad activity that Ayman was involved in.”
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security declined to comment on the specifics of Soliman’s case. But it said it had power over noncitizens even if they’re in the country legally.
“An alien – even with a pending application or lawful status – is not shielded from immigration enforcement action,” an unnamed DHS official said in an email. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services “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; but generally speaking, and as a matter of practice, USCIS cannot discuss the details of individual immigration cases and adjudication decisions.”
Soliman is free, but he said he’s concerned about what happened to some supporters during his incarceration.
Two chaplains were fired from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital — one for attending a vigil for Soliman, and another for giving media interviews in support of her former colleague. After he fired the two, hospital CEO Steve Davis warned other employees to keep quiet about Soliman.
Soliman called on the hospital to rehire the chaplains.
“I think my friends did the right thing by advocating for their colleague, who was facing death back in Egypt,” he said. “I know those who made this decision (to fire them) got a lot of pushback. And I think (the chaplains) should be back in their jobs.”
On July 17, as about 100 people left a vigil for Soliman and marched over the John A. Roebling Bridge into Kentucky, the Covington, Ky., Police Department made 15 arrests, including journalists, shortly after giving an order to disperse.
Cincinnati CityBeat reporter Madeline Fening and photo intern Lucas Griffith were arrested as they covered the march, which occupied travel lanes, obstructing traffic.
Fening and Griffith were charged with felony rioting.
Covington authorities later dropped the felony charges against the journalists, and Fening is scheduled for trial on misdemeanors next week. Griffith is scheduled for Oct. 2.
Meanwhile, more than 20 journalism organizations last week wrote to Kenton County Attorney Stacy Tapke, stressing the importance of a free press and asking her to drop the charges against the reporters, WCPO TV reported Tuesday.
Soliman said he watched TV coverage of the march and the way Covington police reacted from jail. He said he couldn’t sleep that night — partly because of the violence in which some officers engaged. But Soliman was also disturbed that police in the United States would be so quick to arrest reporters covering their beats.
“A free press is essential in any civilized country,” he said. “A free press is a guarantee that people’s voices will always be heard. It is not a crime, and journalists should be protected as long as they’re doing their work professionally. Brutalizing and arresting journalists means these people are doing something wrong, and they don’t want the journalists to cover it.”
Soliman added, “I’m not surprised this is happening with this current government. Civil rights. Free speech. The First Amendment. They are all under direct threat from this government.”
