ICE re-arrests El Gamal family at first check-in, attempts deportation in defiance of federal release order

On the afternoon of Saturday, April 25, 2026, Hayam El Gamal and her five children — ages five through eighteen, including five-year-old twins — reported to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Colorado Springs for the first required check-in following their release from federal detention two days earlier. The release had been ordered by U.S. District Judge Fred Biery of the Western District of Texas, affirming an earlier ruling by U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Chestney, on the conclusion that the family should be freed while their asylum case proceeded. ICE agents at the check-in re-arrested the family, told them they were being deported to Egypt, and rushed them onto a flight bound for Michigan that evening. The family had been held at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley for more than ten months and has never been charged with any crime.

The plane reversed course in mid-air after Judge Biery in San Antonio and U.S. District Judge Nina Wang in Denver issued simultaneous emergency orders Saturday evening directing the government not to remove the family. ICE released the El Gamals just after midnight on April 26. Counsel for the family filed an emergency request with the Fifth Circuit citing what they described as "highly irregular actions" by the government. The Department of Homeland Security defended the re-arrest through Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis, who framed the attempted removal as continued enforcement against people the administration says "have no right to be in our country."

The abusive character of the event lies in the executive branch's defiance of a sitting federal release order. Judge Biery's order — echoing Magistrate Judge Chestney's prior ruling — directed that the family be freed during the pendency of their asylum proceedings; ICE re-arrested them at the very first scheduled post-release contact and attempted removal on a same-day flight, requiring two federal judges to intervene to halt the plane. The family's detention has its origins in the June 2025 arrest of Mohamed Sabry Soliman, the children's father, charged with the Boulder firebombing of a demonstration supporting Israeli hostages and now in federal custody on more than one hundred counts; the mother and children have disavowed him and have never been charged in that case or any other. The entry records the event as a defiance of a binding federal court order and a denial of due process in immigration enforcement, alongside the contemporaneous Kilmar Abrego Garcia removal as part of an emerging pattern of removals attempted in violation of standing federal orders.