Ayman Soliman, the former Muslim chaplain at Cincinnati Children's Hospital whom federal authorities are trying to deport on what his lawyers are saying is a trumped-up basis. (Photo courtesy of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance.)
A former chaplain at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital is suing the federal government in an attempt to regain his asylum status.
He said the government used a set of inaccurate claims and misinterpreted academic articles to revoke it in the first place. The academics themselves agreed, according to documents filed in a Cincinnati federal court last week.
The story of Ayman Soliman has taken on a national profile since his July 9 arrest.
He came legally to the United States in 2014 after he was beaten and tortured by Egypt’s totalitarian government for working with western journalists during the Arab Spring uprising, his lawyers said.
Soliman was granted asylum in 2018, only to see the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service start the process of revoking it last December.
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The government claimed that Soliman provided “material support” to a terrorist organization.
The Muslim Brotherhood was the organization in question. However, Soliman didn’t belong to it, and it’s not designated by the United States as a terrorist organization.
In a motion to reinstate Soliman’s asylum status, his lawyer, Robert Ratliff, points out a key date the government got wrong in trying to revoke it.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services claimed that the Egyptian government designated the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization on Dec. 5, 2012.
That didn’t actually happen until Dec. 25, 2013, and big changes happened in Egypt between the two dates.
Soliman worked with al-Jameya al-Shareya, a group that coordinated community-level social services in a country where nearly a third of people live in poverty and government services are scant.
In 2011, Arab Spring uprisings toppled the long-time, authoritarian government of Hosni Mubarek.
The Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group, had a legally registered political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, or FJP, that participated in ensuing elections.
“The FJP were very successful in these elections, most notably when their candidate, Mohammed Morsi, won the two-round presidential elections in May/June 2012,” Steven Brooke, faculty director of Middle East Studies at the University of Wisconsin, wrote.
“International election observers judged these contests as free and fair, and their results were accepted as valid by the international community, including the United States.”
During that time, Soliman’s group worked occasionally with the Muslim Brotherhood on community-level programs, but Brooke wrote that, “Individual instances of cooperation or overlap do not indicate that al-Jameya al-Shareya is organizationally allied to the Muslim Brotherhood.”
On July 3, 2013, a military junta staged a coup, jailed Morsi and later jailed Soliman for his work as a journalist.
The repressive regime continues in power, with U.S. support.
“Significant numbers of individuals, both affiliated to the Muslim Brotherhood and not, were killed, imprisoned without trial — or forced to flee the country,” Brooke wrote to the court. “As part of this crackdown, the Muslim Brotherhood was declared a terrorist organization in late December of 2013. Under this same military government, Egypt today is one of the most repressive and authoritarian countries in the region.”
Brooke was writing to the court to say that the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service had gotten its facts wrong, and was misusing his work in an attempt to deport Soliman.
“In brief, the documents incorrectly date the Muslim Brotherhood’s designation as a terrorist group by the Egyptian government by one year,” Brooke wrote. “The documents also treated the Egyptian government’s designation uncritically, and do not contextualize what ‘affiliation’ between the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Jameya al-Shareya represents.”
Marie Vannetzel, of France’s National Center for Scientific Research, also wrote the court on Soliman’s behalf.
She said that in revoking Soliman’s refugee status, the Customs and Immigration Service lifted some of her work from its context — apparently intending to mislead.
Government lawyers quoted a sentence in the middle of a paragraph. The middle sentence said the Muslim Brotherhood under Anwar Sadat in the early 1990s was allowed to work with Soliman’s group, al-Jameya al-Shareya, until the brotherhood won a spot on the board. Then the board was dissolved, the sentence said.
But government lawyers left out sentences before and after saying that al-Jameya al-Shareya was a venerable, large “para-public” Islamic charity with many members who had nothing to do with the Muslim Brotherhood.
“I strongly disagree with the way these sentences are quoted and interpreted,” Vannetzel wrote. “I consider this a dishonest manipulation of my text and my work.”
In a separate development in Soliman’s case, an immigration judge denied his application to be released on bail.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had argued that because he was accused of supporting a terrorist group, the immigration judge didn’t have jurisdiction to grant bail.
Immigration judges and their courts are not part of the judiciary. Instead, they’re administered by the Department of Justice, a part of an executive branch whose head is committed to mass deportations. Immigrant support groups say the arrangement is inherently unfair.
For now, Soliman will continue to be jailed in Ohio under a U.S. district judge’s injunction. He’ll remain in the state at least until Aug. 14.
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