A number of supporters rallied on Monday, Martin Luther King Day, in Denver, Colorado, calling for an end to the illegal detention of a mother and her five children, ages 5 to 18. The family continues to be held at an ICE detention facility in Dilley, Texas after the children’s father, Mohamed Soliman, was accused of throwing Molotov cocktails at a pro-Israel march in Colorado Springs on June 1 last year, more than seven months ago.
Speaking at Monday’s rally, Elizabeth Reinhold, who had previously taught several of the siblings, noted that “in the years I have known them [the Soliman children], I have never heard them say an unkind word to or about anyone or show any signs of aggression, anger or hatred.” Reinhold continued through tears, “the [5-year-old] twins were stripped of their opportunity to start kindergarten with their siblings. Habiba [the eldest] was stripped of her freshman year in college and the two other children were stripped of a year of education and friendship as well, all for a crime that they did not commit.”
A friend of the family, Alisha Oliveras, told rally goers, “We condemn the June 1 terrorist attack in Boulder and offer condolences to the victim’s family. And we want to state clearly, we support the release of Hayam El-Gamal and her five children, ages five to 18.”
As the World Socialist Web Site wrote at the time of the arrests, these events make clear that the Trump administration is reviving the medieval and fascist practice of “kin punishment,” a type of collective punishment illegal under both international law and the US Constitution, which forbids violations of due process and the imposition of cruel and unusual punishments.
The family had been taken into custody around the same time as Mohamed Soliman’s arrest shortly after the Colorado Springs attack. The children and their mother were lied to by ICE agents who promised them they were being moved to a hotel for their safety only to find themselves actually locked away in the Texas detention center shortly thereafter.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed at the time that the family’s arrest was relevant to the overall investigation. “We are investigating to what extent this family knew about this heinous attack,” she said, “if they had knowledge of it, or if they provided support to it.”
Celebrating the illegal detention of Soliman’s family members last June, the White House itself released social media postings boasting of their arrest and planned deportation. “Wife and Kids of Illegal Alien Behind Antisemitic Firebombing COULD DEPORT AS EARLY AS TONIGHT.”
In a later court case against Mohamed Soliman, however, an investigating FBI agent testified that the family was not “in any sense aware of what their father was planning,” but the family still remains imprisoned regardless.
Soliman pleaded not guilty to federal charges in November and his trial is scheduled to begin on July 13, 2026. He had worked long hours as an Uber driver prior to the incident and according to the family’s testimony, he often slept in his car after long drives and only occasionally came home.
While initial attempts to deport the family may have been unsuccessful due to court challenges, the family’s prolonged detention also serves much the same political function, i.e., to put workers on notice that should they dare to oppose the crimes of the ruling elite, they put not only themselves but their friends and family at risk, especially very young children.
This was made abundantly clear in a recent press conference with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. At the January 8 event to discuss the ICE killing of Minneapolis mother of three Renée Nicole Good, Noem appeared behind a podium emblazoned with the slogan “One of Ours, All of Yours.”
The slogan was a fascist rallying cry in Franco’s Spain and Hitler’s Germany and was the justification for the 1942 Lidice Massacre, after Czech partisans assassinated SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most brutal Nazi leaders under Hitler and a key architect of the Holocaust. One hundred seventy-three men and boys, aged 15 years and older in the village were murdered, with many of the remaining women and children placed in concentration camps.
Habiba Soliman, the eldest of the five children, and one of the top students in her high school graduating class in Colorado Springs last year, wrote a public letter on January 6 protesting her family’s imprisonment. “We are six innocent people,” she wrote, “including 5-year-old twins—trapped in a nightmare we didn’t create and punished for our father’s actions.” She continued, “They [DHS] chose to ignore the results of the FBI investigation that shows we did not know anything.”
In September, a judge ordered the family released on bond as they were considered neither a flight risk nor danger to the community. ICE once again has refused to release the six and has appealed the ruling using the pending appeal as a pretext to defy the judge’s order.
While the family and its supporters continue to fight against their unjust incarceration, the Trump administration has accelerated its open war against the working class, both immigrant and native-born alike. The massive deployment of troops and ICE agents to cities across the country, especially Minnesota, has been accompanied by an unannounced campaign of child kidnapping.
At Valley View Elementary in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, four minor children were taken away by ICE agents Tuesday. These included a 5-year-old boy, a 10-year-old girl and a 17-year-old who was taken without her parents present.
The 10-year-old had been allowed to call her father telling him that the agents were bringing her and her mother to school, only for her father to find both his wife and daughter not present when he arrived. As he later found out, the agents had used the call as a diversionary tactic while they moved both mother and daughter to a detention center in Texas.
One of the more notorious of these ICE child arrest rampages was a military-style assault on a residential Chicago apartment building in November.
Such actions are not novel to the Trump administration either. Trump himself is only building upon the framework of Obama and Biden beforehand, who both initiated widespread crackdowns on immigrants along with family separation practices and the arrests of children.
To cite only one example, the Deportation Data Project found that in the state of Alabama alone, which ranks 25th in the country in population, 70 children were arrested by ICE agents between September 2023 and September 2025.
These outrages have evoked no significant opposition whatsoever from the Democratic Party, while the trade union apparatus has done everything in its power to prevent Friday’s general strike in Minneapolis from spreading.
Workers and young people must instead take the struggle into their own hands, forming their own rank-and-file committees to initiate a national general strike to bring down the Trump regime and hold accountable all those responsible for these vile attacks against workers and their children.