By Kanishka Singh
WASHINGTON, April 25 (Reuters) – An Egyptian family which was released from more than 10 months of immigration detention following court orders was taken into custody again by federal authorities for several hours on Saturday, the family’s legal team said.
Hayam El Gamal and her five children aged 5 to 18 were detained less than 48 hours after a federal judge had ordered their release, the family’s legal team said in a statement.
The family, which lives in Colorado, was arrested as they complied with a requirement to check in at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Denver, according to The Colorado Sun.
ICE had put them on a plane that would have flown to Michigan “and then outside the United States to an unknown location,” the family’s legal team said. Eric Lee, a lawyer for the family, later said a federal court granted an emergency motion to stop the planned deportation.
Lee posted early on Sunday that “ICE just released the El Gamal family,” saying their detention violated court orders.
In a statement on Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security said the family was receiving “full due process” and cast the judge who ordered the family’s release as an “activist judge” who is “releasing this terrorist’s family onto American streets AGAIN.”
“We are confident the courts will ultimately vindicate us,” the DHS’ acting assistant secretary, Lauren Bis, said. The statement did not address why the family was detained on Saturday after Thursday’s ruling.
El Gamal and the children were released from their earlier detention on Thursday after U.S. District Judge Fred Biery ordered their release following a similar separate ruling earlier in the week.
The family was first taken into federal custody last June. Their immigration detention, the longest for a family under President Donald Trump’s administration, began after El Gamal’s ex-husband, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, was charged with attempted murder, assault and a federal hate crime following last year’s firebomb attack in Boulder, Colorado.
The U.S. government has previously said it was investigating how much the family knew about the attack. El Gamal, who divorced Soliman after his arrest, has condemned the Boulder attack and said the family had no knowledge of any plans for it.
Trump has defended his immigration crackdown as necessary to curb illegal immigration and reduce crime. Critics and rights groups have said the DHS campaign violates due process and free speech.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Andrea Ricci and Christian Schmollinger)
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