On June 18, 2025, the US District Court for the Western District of Texas granted a motion to extend for an additional 14 days an earlier Temporary Restraining Order (TRO), ensuring that the wife and children of Mohamed Soliman, the man accused of a firebombing attack in Boulder, Colorado, can not be immediately deported from the US.

The order was signed by US District Judge Orlando Garcia.

Soliman faces federal charges including hate crimes in connection with the attack on June 1, in which 15 people were seriously injured from Molotov cocktails thrown into a crowd of protesters calling for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza.

Additionally, just as Judge Garcia’s order was issued, Ms. El Gamal herself released a powerful statement, exposing the trauma inflicted upon her and her innocent children by the fascists in the White House and US Justice Department.

In her statement, Hayam El Gamal shared her profound distress, “My five children and I are in total shock over what they say my husband did in Boulder, Colorado earlier this month.” She continued: 

So many lives were ruined on that day. There is never an excuse for hurting innocent people. We have been cooperating with the authorities, who are trying their best to get to the bottom of this. We send our love to the many families who are suffering as a result of the attack.

Ms. El Gamal recounted the terrifying experience of the family’s arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on June 3:

We were arrested by ICE on June 3, put on a flight to Texas in the middle of the night and have now been in an immigration jail in Texas for two weeks. This includes my two four-year-old children, my seven-year-old, my fifteen-year-old, and my oldest daughter, who just turned eighteen in jail. We are grieving, and we are suffering.

Ms. El Gamal went on to describe their treatment:

We are treated like animals by the officers, who told us we are being punished for what my husband is accused of doing. But why punish me? Why punish my four-year-old children? Why punish any of us, who did nothing wrong?

She highlighted the efforts of the family to integrate into American society, noting,

Since coming to America three years ago, we have tried to do everything right. We got work permits. We learned English. My daughter and I volunteered teaching English to other immigrants, to help them become more comfortable in America. We have always tried to be good neighbors, cooking food for those around us regardless of whether they are Muslim, Christian or Jewish. I do not judge anyone based on his religion. If your heart is good, that’s enough. 

Her aspirations for her children are same as every family all over the world:

All I want is to give my children good lives. My oldest daughter volunteered at a hospital; she has a 4.5 GPA and wants to become a doctor, to help people in this country. My kids want to go to school, they want to see their friends and deal with their grief from recent weeks. But here they can’t sleep. They cry throughout the day, asking me, ‘When will we get to go home?’

The psychological toll on her children is immense. She described how they were, “forced to watch officials rough-up another detainee, and they cried and cried, thinking they would be roughed-up, too.”

Now, her seven-year-old is about to have a birthday in jail, and her fifteen-year-old too. The lack of humanity within the detention center is palpable, as she explained:

Instead, we are here, in jail in Texas, where you can’t be human. Where you are always being watched. Where you are woken up in the middle of the night by guards and given food fit for animals.

Ms. El Gamal fears that the damage to her children will be “irreversible” and asks, “How much longer will we be here for something we didn’t do?”

The extension of the TRO is a short term victory against the Trump administration’s punitive actions. The initial Temporary Restraining Order was issued on June 4, 2025, by Judge Gordon P. Gallagher of the US District Court for the District of Colorado, blocking the defendants—Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Director Kristi Noem and other within the DHS leadership—from removing Ms. El Gamal and her children from the United States.

The earlier decision came after the White House’s official X account explicitly boasted of the plan to put the family through “expedited removal,” with posts like “Six One-Way Tickets for Mohamed’s Wife and Five Kids. Final Boarding Call Coming Soon” and the accompanying graphic stating they “Could Be Deported By Tonight.”

On June 12, 2025, Judge Gallagher transferred the petition to the US District Court for the Western District of Texas, noting that the family had already been moved to Texas by the time the petition was filed. The Colorado court maintained the TRO, stating it would remain intact until further order from the transferee court or its 14-day expiration on June 18, 2025.

The petitioner’s attorneys promptly filed a motion to extend the TRO for an additional 14 days, citing Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(b)(2)2. They argued that “good cause” existed because “the grounds for originally granting the temporary restraining order continue to exist.”

The attorneys emphasized that “the danger that justified the TRO has not abated” and that the defendant’s opposition to the extension confirmed this risk. The Western District of Texas Court agreed, extending the TRO for an additional 14 days and setting a hearing to be determined by separate order.

Attorneys for Ms. El Gamal—Chris Godshall-Bennett, Eric Lee and Niels Frenzen—have vehemently condemned the administration’s actions as a form of “collective punishment” or “Sippenhaft” (family punishment), a practice associated with medieval justice systems and modern police states including the regime of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany.

As Lee stated earlier, “Punishing individuals for the purported actions of their relatives is a feature of medieval justice systems or police state dictatorships, not democracies.” He further articulated that the detention and attempted removal of the family is “an assault on core democratic principles.”

The detention of Hayam El Gamal and her children is a stark warning that if the Trump administration is permitted to strip families of basic rights solely on alleged crimes committed by a relative, there is nothing preventing the state from asserting similar powers against all political opponents.

The working class must unequivocally oppose such a barbaric revival of “kin punishment” and fight for the democratic rights of all, immigrant and non-immigrant alike.