CINCINNATI — In recent years, if you lived in the Queen City metropolitan area and your young child was severely ill, or dying of a terminal condition, chances are good that you encountered Ayman Soliman, who until recently was a Muslim chaplain at the renowned Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.
Whatever your faith or beliefs, he would have consoled you and your family in your darkest hours, in the kind of moment that every parent lives in abject terror of ever having to face. If you and your family were Muslim, the chaplain may have answered your questions about whether a do-not-resuscitate order for your child was permitted by the Quran. One former colleague of the imam recounts that specifically because of Soliman, there are poor members of the community who did not need to worry about paying for the funerals of their babies who didn’t make it out of the hospital alive.
Absolutely none of that matters to President Donald Trump and his administration, which is seeking to deport Soliman back to Egypt, where he and his advocates say he will be marked for death — in part due to his work as a journalist there in the midst of the Arab Spring.
Soliman was granted asylum during Trump’s first presidency. Ever since then, he says he’s been working to earn his American citizenship, and to bring his family to the United States to reunite with him.
