Held for 72 days at a notorious Ohio jail, the legal about-turn marks a major blow to the Trump administration’s aggressive and often illegal deportation campaign that’s seen hundreds of thousands of people forced out of the US, often without due process.
Soliman’s ordeal began during a regular check-in with immigration officials in Cincinnati on 9 July, when the 51-year-old from Cairo was subjected to an hours-long interview before being detained by an Ice agent and a representative of the FBI.
Soliman was transported to the Butler county jail and held in freezing conditions for 12 hours in the jail’s waiting room, where he struggled to stay warm wearing just a t-shirt and pants.
“The beds were rusted, and the only toilet was in a room with 13 or 14 other people around. It was traumatizing and dehumanizing,” he recalls.
Things worsened when Soliman was put in isolation – a cell where he was separated from others and denied nearly all rights granted to other detainees – for five days. He says it followed an argument when Soliman’s request for a quiet space to pray was rejected by a correctional officer who then claimed Soliman failed to comply with a lockdown call, something the imam denies.
“There is a multi-purpose room where Christian pastors and Muslim imams come to administer to people, but the officer told me to pray at the gym where people were playing basketball,” he says.
“He grabbed my arms, I asked him to take his hands off me, then he pressed an emergency button and in seconds five or six officers rushed in and they handcuffed me.”
Correctional officers at Butler County Jail have been accused of abusing detainees in the past. In 2020, two men refugees detained by Ice at the jail filed a lawsuit against the jail and an officer, claiming that beatings resulted in serious physical abuse including the loss of teeth.