Egyptian Family of Six Re-Detained After 10 Months in ICE Custody, Ordered Released by Court, Now Being Deported to Egypt

An Egyptian family of six believed to be the longest held at the controversial South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley was redetained Saturday after federal judges this week ordered their release.

The family, consisting of Hayam El Gamal and her five children, had been released from the detention facility in Texas on Thursday but was taken back into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody days later, according to their attorney Eric Lee.

Lee said Saturday morning that Hayam El Gamal and her five children were on a private jet in Denver bound for Egypt because of a court order violation, describing the situation as “a very live situation – an absolutely brazen violation of separation of powers.”

On Saturday, the family’s attorneys filed an emergency motion to block the deportation. U.S. District Court Judge Fred Biery of the Western District of Texas, who had ordered the family’s release earlier in the week, granted the motion.

A second order by a federal judge in Colorado was issued Saturday evening, reiterating that the family should not be deported.

The rulings came as the family was on a plane to Michigan, from where the government ostensibly planned to quickly deport them to Egypt, where their attorneys said the mother and her children fear persecution.

The family’s attorney, Michigan-based Eric Lee, posted on X that the plane “constitutionally cannot be allowed to take off.”

It would not have been the first time that the Trump administration deported immigrants after federal judges ordered against their removal. Among the most well-known cases is that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia of El Salvador, who was living in Maryland before he was mistakenly sent to a notorious mega-prison in that Central American country last year despite an earlier U.S. Court order barring Abrego Garcia’s deportation.

In June 2025, El Gamal was arrested in connection to her then husband, Mohamed Sabry Soliman. Federal authorities say Soliman threw molotov cocktails into a crowd at an event drawing awareness to hostages in Gaza. The firebombing attack injured more than a dozen people, including an 82-year-old woman who later died from her wounds. Soliman is facing an attempted murder charge in addition to federal hate crimes.

The El Gamal family’s case has drawn national attention. They had been detained at the much-criticized Dilley detention center for 10 months, a term believed to be the longest of any family during Donald Trump’s second administration.