Imam Ayman Soliman, a children’s hospital Muslim chaplain, spent 73 days in jail after Donald Trump’s ICE detained him this past summer.
On Tuesday, I spoke to him in a live Zeteo Town Hall about his time behind bars and the sustained community effort to free him.
“Along the 73 days, I got over 760 letters of support from people, 99% of them people I never met, I never heard of,” Soliman says. “They just heard my story, and they wrote very, very powerful letters, where they told me that you will not be forgotten, you belong here – we’re going to be fighting for you until you will walk out free.”
Soliman was detained on July 9 in a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio, and then taken to the Butler County Jail. (From where I’m sitting right now typing this sentence, I could walk to the suburban federal facility where he was taken into custody; that’s how local this abduction – which generated significant Ohio and national media attention – was in my community.)
To the Trump administration, it did not matter that Soliman had gained a local reputation in recent years as a man who excelled at comforting the families of sick, or even dying, children and babies. It did not matter that he came here legally from Egypt, a country where he says he would face political retaliation and possible death. It did not matter that the allegations against him for material support for “terrorism” were flimsy at best. The Trump administration tried to deport him.
After ICE sent him to a Butler County jail, the Trump administration hysterically smeared him – on social media and in court – as a jihadist sympathizer and supporter. For 73 days, Soliman sat in jail, fearing the worst outcome. And for those 73 days, his friends and allies – some of whom he’d never met before – fought like hell to keep him in Ohio. A coalition of ordinary people banded together to say in one voice: You will not disappear our friend – not without a fight.
Today, Soliman is a free man. For the time being, a local community rose up to take on a lumbering, fascist behemoth – and won.
Watch our full conversation to hear Soliman discuss his detention, the community support, what he’d say to Trump, JD Vance, or Kristi Noem if they were sitting in front of him right now, what he would say to fellow Muslims who voted for Trump in 2024, and much more.
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