Attorney on 9-year-old client in Dilley detention site: ‘She wishes she was no longer alive’

The family of 5 has been detained in the immigrant detention facility near San Antonio for 8 months, and each of the kids has had a birthday inside.

by Stephanie KoithanFebruary 11, 2026

A 5-year-old girl detained in Dilley drew herself and her family trapped in a cage.Credit: Courtesy / Eric Lee

A 9-year-old girl detained in Dilley’s South Texas Family Residential Center says she wants to die, according to family attorney Eric Lee, who recently went viral when a protest erupted inside the facility as he tried to visit his clients.

“The 9-year-old has expressed that she wishes she was no longer alive,” Lee said in a Wednesday phone interview with the Current.

Lee said the mother conveyed her child’s alarming wish to him in a recent a phone call from within the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility an hour southwest of San Antonio, which houses over 1,400 people, including hundreds of children.

Lee represents a family of five, consisting of the 9-year-old along with 5-year-old twin sisters, a 16-year old brother, an 18-year-old sister and her mother. All are Egyptian citizens, and all have had birthdays inside the facility. The minors are not named in this article to protect their identities.

The family, which immigrated from Kuwait, has been detained in Dilley for eight months for what Lee calls “political retribution” from the Trump administration for the alleged crimes of the family’s patriarch, Mohamed Soliman. Soliman became a suspect in an anti-Semitic attack in Boulder, Colorado last June using Molotov cocktails and a makeshift flamethrower.

The attack left seven people injured. One 82-year-old woman died from injuries relating to the attack 24 days later. Soliman received 12 counts of federal hate crime and 118 state criminal charges.

When the attack occurred, Soliman had been estranged from the family for at least a year, living in his car over an hour away and working as an Uber driver, according to Lee. Soliman only saw his family once a week at most, the attorney added, saying they had no knowledge of his plans. The family has spoken out condemning the attack and the mother, Hayam El Gamal, is now seeking a divorce.

Over the months of detainment, their mental health has deteriorated, Lee said.

On a previous visit, the 9-year old daughter gave Lee a picture she drew inside Dilley. The drawing is of the Colorado house she hasn’t seen in the months she’s been in detention.

One of the five-year-old twins also gave Lee a drawing, which depicts her and her family in a cage. She told Lee that she had a dream that she was trying to run away from a wild animal.

“But she’s stuck in a cage and can’t get out,” Lee said.

The family’s younger kids also have begun skipping meals, “which they hadn’t been doing before,” Lee added.

People detained at the Dilley site have complained that the food inside sometimes is served with bugs, worms and mold. Lee described the water there as “putrid.”

The 16-year-old boy at one point suffered from appendicitis and was told to simply take a pain reliever before collapsing and being rushed to the hospital.

“He could have died,” Lee said.

But, if deported, the family could face certain death in Egypt, Lee claims, for cooperating with the FBI and speaking out against their patriarch.

The Detroit attorney says after months of detention, the Soliman family’s optimism began to rapidly decline in January.

“They really believed that the immigration judge was going to give them a fair hearing after he granted them bond in September,” Lee said. “And so they were hopeful, they were hopeful that they were going to be released through that process, and they weren’t.”

Meanwhile, even the older siblings have shown signs of worsening mental health, despite attempting to hold it together for their family, the attorney added.

“[T]he 16 year old, who’s been kind of, you know, rock solid, taking on the role of man of the house — his attitude has really begun to change,” Lee said. “And that goes for all of them.”

The oldest daughter, Habiba Soliman, was separated from her family once she turned 18 as punishment for talking to the press, Lee asserted. Separated from her family, she’s also been denied religious exemptions, he added.

“They’ve been calling me less in the last week or so, which I think is because they’re just sort of despondent and depressed,” Lee said of his clients. “That’s been the goal from the start, to ruin these children’s lives. And they didn’t do anything.”

U.S. District Judge Fred Biery, who wrote the fiery opinion releasing 5-year-old Minneapolis boy Liam Conejo Ramos from the same facility, will consider the family’s third habeas case, but Lee doesn’t know when.

“It’s a deplorable situation. There’s really no silver lining,” Lee added.