9/19/25 Reposted from cleveland.com
CLEVELAND, Ohio — A Cincinnati hospital chaplain walked out of jail on Friday after the government dropped a controversial immigration case that was set for trial next week.
Ayman Soliman was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in July after his asylum status, which he held since 2018, was revoked.
Soliman’s attorney, Rob Ratliff, said attorneys for the Department of Homeland Security dropped Soliman’s immigration case on Friday and that he expects Soliman’s asylum status to be reinstated in the next few days. That permits Soliman to legally live and work in the U.S.
The Muslim Legal Defense Fund of America, which had also represented Soliman, called his release “miraculous.”
“He can now return to the community he serves as an interfaith Imam who stood by him throughout this ordeal,” a statement from the legal group said.
Soliman is an imam who worked as a chaplain at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. His arrest sparked national attention amid President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
His trial was set to begin Thursday in Cleveland Immigration Court. If he lost, he would have been deported to Egypt, where his attorneys and supporters said he faced almost certain death.
A video posted on Instagram showed Soliman wearing a navy suit, smiling as he left jail Friday.
Supporters lauded the decision.
“We’re so excited to see Ayman at home, where he belongs,” said Lynn Tramonte of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance. “Ayman has always been there for everyone else. Caring for others is his life’s mission.”
It’s unclear why the case was dropped. Officials with the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately return messages seeking comment.
Ratliff said federal attorneys dismissed it hours after he requested a hearing regarding discrepancies he found in documents filed over Soliman’s asylum revocation.
One document, sent to Soliman by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, accused him of providing material support for a terrorism organization. A second, filed in the immigration court case, additionally accused him of being a member of a terrorist organization.
Ratliff said he has seen other cases where government attorneys or officials make mistakes on documents and cases get thrown out.
“Why the discrepancy? We don’t know,” Ratliff said. “The reality is that it’s the government, so we may never know the real story.”
Soliman, 51, has been jailed since July 9.
He fled to the United States in 2014 after he was imprisoned and tortured in Egypt for helping journalists cover the Arab Spring uprising in 2010 and 2011.
Department of Homeland Security attorneys had argued that Soliman should be deported because his asylum status was revoked over accusations that he supported a terrorist organization — the Muslim Brotherhood— while working for a charity in Egypt.
Soliman’s immigration attorneys had argued that he was a board member for a local affiliate of the charity, Al-Gam’iyya al-Shar’iyya, that had no links to terrorism. They further argued that Soliman worked only for a local branch of the charity and had no contact with national-level officials.
Attorneys also previously said the authors of two studies cited by Department of Homeland Security were expected to testify at the trial and would denounce the agency’s interpretation.
Homeland Security officials also backed off accusations they made earlier in the case that Soliman had arrest warrants for murder in Iraq. Federal attorneys later removed those accusations from the record and chalked it up to an inadvertent reference to another case.
Soliman’s attorneys filed several lawsuits after his arrest. One ended when a federal judge barred ICE officials from moving him to another jail outside of Ohio.
A second sought his release from jail and the reinstatement of his asylum. The third pushed for his release based on accusations that his rights were violated in the Butler County Jail.
