This story is part of CityBeat’s “ICE Age” series about the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrant community members.
Supporters of Imam Ayman Soliman gathered at the Ohio Statehouse on Aug. 25 to publicly ask Gov. Mike DeWine to help free Cincinnati’s imprisoned faith leader.
“Ayman would be going to his death if he is deported back to Egypt,” said Sister Gemma Doll of Dominican Sisters of Peace. “And our Catholic faith — faith that unites us, Governor DeWine — stands firmly in the stance of every human person has the right to life.”
Sister Doll was one of several members of the faith community to deliver a letter to DeWine’s office, urging the Republican to “act swiftly and decisively” on Soliman’s behalf.
“Governor, your intervention could turn despair into hope, silence into spiritual restoration, and save a beloved human life,” reads the letter signed by 1,166 “concerned members of the faith community.”
But Soliman’s detention at the Butler County Jail is a federal issue, and Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones said he wouldn’t free Soliman at DeWine’s request.
Soliman will remain in the Butler County Jail for the duration of his immigration fight after a U.S. District Court judge in Cincinnati granted a preliminary injunction on Aug. 21, ordering that Soliman remain in the court’s jurisdiction.
Inside the Ohio Statehouse, Tala Ali, a member of Ayman’s advocacy team and chair of the Cincinnati Islamic Association, said the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) case against Soliman is “nonexistent.”
“DHS lawyers filed a claim that Ayman should not be considered for asylum based on multiple warrants in Iraq for murder and terrorist-related activities,” Ali said. “Ayman has never been to Iraq.”
Ali called the Iraq claim a “monumental screw-up on behalf of DHS lawyers.” She believes the claim could be a case of mistaken identity — the wrong Ayman Soliman — or perhaps something worse.
“Or they’ve exposed themselves in failing to delete a footnote in their filing as they copy and paste filings en masse to dragnet and target Muslims,” she said.
Timeline
The Iraq claim is not the first federal accusation against Soliman to be quickly debunked. It’s the third.
Here’s a pared-down timeline of Soliman’s legal journey to better understand the issue:
2014: Soliman fled Egypt to the U.S. after he said he was jailed and tortured by the Egyptian government for his journalistic coverage of the Arab Spring.
2015: Soliman applied for asylum status.
2018: His asylum application is vetted and approved. Soliman now has indefinite legal status in the United States — he applied for a green card soon after.
2021: Soliman discovered there was an “FBI flag” on his record when he was offered a position at the Oregon Department of Corrections (ODOC) as an Islamic chaplain. Soliman sued the FBI and the Terrorist Screening Center, claiming his fingerprints did not match prints in the government’s terrorism screening database. That lawsuit is ongoing.
December 2024: Soliman is informed that DHS is considering terminating his previously decided asylum case. His attorneys tell CityBeat this is when Soliman first learned DHS was investigating his past involvement in the group Al-Jameya al Shareya (also written as Al-Gam’iyya al Shar’iyya) when he lived in Egypt. It is still unclear what triggered this investigation. His attorneys said he disclosed his involvement as a board member of one branch of the organization to DHS when he applied for asylum, which was granted.
The U.S. government alleges Soliman’s involvement with Al-Jameya al Shareya showed “material support for terrorism,” claiming the organization supported the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 in Egypt and now operates in several other countries. Ned Price, a former CIA officer and former National Security Council official, told NBC News that the “vast majority” of branches of the Muslim Brotherhood do not espouse violence. Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, also told NBC “there is not a single American expert on the Muslim Brotherhood who supports designating them” as a terrorist organization. While the Muslim Brotherhood is currently designated as a terrorist organization in Egypt, the United States has not officially made this designation.
Soliman’s attorneys pointed out that Al-Jameya al Shareya is also not a designated terrorist organization, pushing back on any claim that Soliman could be guilty by association.
“Al-Jameya al Shareya is not a terrorist group,” Soliman’s legal team said in July. “It is a nongovernmental organization that provides medical services and charitable community services. Neither the U.S. government nor the Egyptian government has designated AGS/AJS a terrorist group.”
July 9, 2025: Soliman is arrested by federal agents during a mandatory immigration check-in appointment at a Department of Homeland Security office in Blue Ash. Advocates said he was extensively questioned by immigration and FBI agents about his political affiliations before the arrest. Soliman has been held in ICE detention at the Butler County Jail since his arrest.
July 23, 2025: DHS lawyers dropped their claim that Soliman had previously shown material support for a terrorist organization. The claim was dropped on the matter of removability from the U.S. but still cited the claim for arguments against releasing Soliman on bond.
July 25, 2025: DHS lawyers claim Soliman has multiple warrants for his arrest in Iraq. Soliman’s legal team insists he has never set foot in the country. Soliman’s lawyers tell CityBeat that DHS has not admitted this allegation was a mistake but said DHS has confirmed the claim “was not a reference to Ayman.”
“We do not know much more than that,” Soliman’s lead attorney Robert Ratliff told CityBeat. “It had the effect of delaying our bond appeal and seeking other challenges, because once made we obviously had to track down this allegation and verify that it was not true. During that, DHS informed us that the allegation should not be construed as being applicable to Ayman. But we do not know whether the court believed it to be true or not, or even how the court read or understood the statement.”
Untangling the narrative
Ahilan Arulanantham is the co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy (CILP) at UCLA School of Law. His expertise includes asylum and the border, and he’s argued before the United States Supreme Court on behalf of Americans of the Muslim faith who were targeted by the federal government for surveillance because of their religion.
Arulanantham said the government’s various terrorism claims against Soliman – a devout faith leader with no criminal record – are likely false, but they’re not surprising. In fact, he told CityBeat that cases like this are very common.
“There’s lots of those historically to look at, in my experience, and they’re just rife with error of all kinds,” Arulanantham said. “There are huge databases flooded with garbage, which is why you get these. […] It could be that some other person named Ayman Soliman was traveling and got arrested somewhere, could be in some other country. And then that goes back and triggers some other thing, and then a flag pops up, and they’re like, oh, this person’s now in [Cincinnati]. And so then somebody goes, ‘What’s that?’”
But rather than investigating the perceived connection between an immigrant and a name on a list, Arulanantham said DHS will often press charges or place someone on a restrictive list.
“I had a German Muslim woman, a client, a green card holder, on the no-fly list. She literally could not board a plane to go see her mom,” he said. “We sued and then they took her off [the list], and we never figured out what on earth caused it.”
While it can be hard to identify what exactly triggers someone being placed on a no-fly list or having false warrants in Iraq, Arulanantham points to a deeper systemic issue.
“I hate to say it, but there’s a lot of Islamophobia in the FBI,” he said. “They were trained by people who were Islamophobic and we’re giving these trainings to FBI agents that were caricaturing Islam in a negative way and really giving people a false understanding of it, and as a result, sort of helping to drive Islamophobia within the FBI.”
While false or far-reaching claims of terrorism aren’t uncommon for Muslims in the U.S., Arulanantham said one fact in Soliman’s asylum case stands out as unique: the fact that it was brought up for review at all.
“People who are asylees almost never have attempts to revoke their asylum status,” he said. “Unless in the rare instance when somebody commits and is convicted of a crime after they already got asylum. The basic reason for that is, if there were really any basis for these allegations, and they’re based on pre-asylum conduct — conduct that he allegedly engaged in before he won asylum — then they should have brought it up at that hearing. In general, this doesn’t really happen.”
What’s next?
If DHS lawyers have mostly backed off the material support for terrorism claim, and if the Iraq warrants have been proven false, why is Soliman still in jail facing possible deportation?
Simply put, the allegations put his immigration journey back at square one.
Ratliff puts it more technically, outlining how the varying courts and their differing jurisdictions have created a complicated legal equation that shifts the power over Soliman’s future away from immigration courts.
“For purposes of bond, DHS has relied on the material support allegation to strip jurisdiction from the immigration court to consider bond,” he said.
“So, DHS-USCIS granted asylum; DHS-USCIS, terminated asylum as they found their allegations to be more credible than Ayman’s defenses to the charges; DHS placed him into immigration court removal proceedings; DHS, for asylum, now places the burden on him to prove he has not done what they alleged; DHS has detained him based on their allegations; DHS has convinced the immigration judge that, based on their allegations, the immigration court has no jurisdiction to review DHS’ custody determination.”
“Ultimately we expect DHS will argue that he is not eligible for asylum based on their same allegations.”
Despite having been granted asylum in 2018, the burden now rests on Soliman — the imam who comforted dying children and their families at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital before his arrest — to prove he’s not a terrorist.
Soliman is scheduled to appear in immigration court on Sept. 3.
A version of this story appears in CityBeat’s upcoming print issue.
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This article appears in Aug 20 – Sep 2, 2025.