Soliman’s Master Calendar hearing concluded

Following are excerpts from the Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s coverage of Ayman Soliman’s final Master Calendar hearing on July 29, 2025:

Soliman on Tuesday had a brief hearing in front of Immigration Judge Jennifer Riedthaler-Williams, who [ruled that she did not have jurisdiction to make a ruling on bond] late Monday in Cleveland. She set a new hearing for Aug. 12 to determine if Soliman can be deported.

During the hearing, Soliman asked the judge if he could be granted access to Zoom classes for a master’s degree in divinity that he’s pursuing while detained in the Butler County Jail. He has been held since his July 9 arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

The judge told his attorney to make arrangements with jail officials.

Soliman, who served as the children’s hospital chaplain for four years and is an imam at Clifton Mosque, is at the center of a national firestorm over his arrest.

He fled Egypt in 2014 after helping journalists cover the Arab Spring uprisings and was arrested and tortured in that country, according to his attorneys. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services granted him asylum in 2018, giving him legal status to remain in the United States because returning him to Egypt would likely result in his persecution. His attorneys said that if he’s deported to Egypt, he faces almost certain death.

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Homeland Security attorneys in the immigration case initially charged Soliman with supporting terrorism. Last week, they took those accusations out of the allegations.

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Soliman’s attorneys sued the federal government twice since his arrest. In the first case, his attorney successfully argued for a judge to temporarily order Homeland Security to keep him in Ohio before a decision was made on Soliman’s bond. That case will be dismissed soon because of the immigration judge’s bond ruling, [Soliman’s attorney] Ratliff said.

His attorneys also filed a lawsuit Friday in federal court in Cincinnati that seeks a judge’s order to reinstate Soliman’s asylum status and to order his release on bond.

It says federal officials used Soliman’s work for a charity, Al-Gam’iyya al-Shar’iyya, as proof he supported terrorism. Soliman was a board member and donor for one of about 1,000 local branches of the charity that focused on giving medical and other charitable relief, his attorneys have said.

The lawsuit said that Soliman has no knowledge of what upper-level officials in the national organization did or didn’t do. In addition, the organization itself had no links to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Homeland Security used two scholarly journals to support their accusations to revoke his asylum and to fight his immigration court case.

Both works were published before 2018, when Soliman was granted asylum, and were misinterpreted, attorneys said in the lawsuit.

Both authors— University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor Steven Brooke and Marie Vannetzel, a researcher at France’s National Center for Scientific Research— wrote letters on behalf of Soliman’s case that denounced their works’ usage.

Vannetzel’s letter called Homeland Security officials’ interpretation “a dishonest manipulation” of her work. She wrote that the charity had a limited history of involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood and had nothing to do with terrorism.

Read the full article here.