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.
A 9-year-old child detained in Dilley for months drew this picture of her one-time home.Credit: Courtesy / Eric Lee
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.
Many people seem to expect me to draw this comic forever. You’ve seen the amount of hate that I get for it. Anyone who googles my name will be terrified to even speak to me. Every bit of the person I am is being shred and crushed and mocked. It’s practically destroying my life and any hope that I do anything else in the future, as well as affecting me on physical and mental levels.
Now why am I still doing it? Part of it because making comics is everything I wanted in my life. I guess I could make comics that would make the majority feel good or that aren’t political, but that would feel like betraying my readers. Another part is because those readers are amazing and give me life. People have been sharing their stories with me in a way that would make any creator jealous.
The fact is that I am doing all of this by myself. I never got any help or support from publishers, editors, media, government or visible person of any kind. I’m putting everything in your hands. I trust my readers to keep this project alive. It might make my anxiety peak, as I know that as soon as you grow disinterested in my silly stories, I won’t have any other choice to survive than change my name and return to school.
So please, keep reblogging those stories, like them, comment on them. That’s the reasons why they’re out there. ❤
I know I already posted the one below but I love it and wanted to post it again. I wish shy abused gay me had a protector. The predators seemed everywhere. Hugs
I will never tone down or stop fighting for everyone’s equality. I wonder how many politicans said hey tone down this civil rights for black people stuff back in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Where would they have been if they had been listened to? Same with marriage equality—far too many democrats said don’t push for it. Either we all have equality of civil rights or no one does. I will not agree to disagree on someone’s basic rights.
What is with the desperate need to murder people, even criminals? It doesn’t deter crime and can’t be reversed if it is found out to be a wrong conviction. Hugs
We’re starting to see members of Congress react to the supreme court ruling that many of Donald Trump’s global tariffs are illegal.
Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren, said that no decision can “undo the massive damage that the Trump tariffs have done to small businesses, to American supply chains, and especially to American families forced to pay higher prices on everything from groceries to housing”.
She added that there is “no legal mechanism for consumers and many small businesses to recoup the money they have already paid”.
“Giant corporations with their armies of lawyers and lobbyists can sue for tariff refunds, then just pocket the money for themselves. It’s one more example of how the game is rigged,” said Warren, who is the ranking member on the Senate banking committee. “Any refunds from the federal government should end up in the pockets of the millions of Americans and small businesses that were illegally cheated out of their hard-earned money by Donald Trump.”
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Haha. Also note, he’s true to form of accusing his opposition of what’s true about himself and his cult.
In his remarks today, Trump lambasted the liberal supreme court justices today, as well as those who concurred with the opinion that the use of IEEPA was illegal.
“The Democrats on the court are thrilled,” Trump said. “They’re against anything that makes America strong, healthy and great again. They also are a frankly, disgrace to our nation, those justices.”
He went on to criticize “certain” members of the court, which would include justices he nominated to the bench – such as Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett.
“They’re very unpatriotic and disloyal to our constitution,” Trump added. “It’s my opinion that the court has been swayed by foreign interests and a political movement that is far smaller than people would ever think,” he said without citing any evidence for his claims.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A former FBI informant pleaded guilty on Monday to lying about a phony bribery scheme involving President Joe Biden and his son Hunter that became central to the Republican impeachment inquiry in Congress.
Alexander Smirnov entered his plea to a felony charge in connection with the bogus story, along with a tax evasion charge stemming from a separate indictment accusing him of concealing millions of dollars of income.
An attorney for Smirnov, 44, declined to comment after the hearing in Los Angeles federal court.
Prosecutors and the defense have agreed to recommend a sentence of between four and six years in prison when he’s sentenced next month.
Smirnov will get credit for the time he has served since his February arrest on charges that he told his FBI handler that executives from the Ukrainian energy company Burisma had paid President Biden and Hunter Biden $5 million each around 2015.
Smirnov had been an informant for more than a decade when he made the explosive allegations about the Bidens in June 2020, after “expressing bias” about Joe Biden as a presidential candidate, prosecutors said.
But Smirnov had only routine business dealings with Burisma starting in 2017, according to court documents. An FBI field office investigated the allegations and recommended the case be closed in August 2020, according to charging documents.
No evidence has emerged that Joe Biden acted corruptly or accepted bribes as president or in his previous office as vice president.
While Smirnov’s identity wasn’t publicly known before the indictment, his claims played a major part in the Republican effort in Congress to investigate the president and his family, and helped spark a House impeachment inquiry into Biden. Before Smirnov’s arrest, Republicans had demanded the FBI release the unredacted form documenting the unverified allegations, though they acknowledged they couldn’t confirm if they were true.
During a September 2023 conversation with investigators, Smirnov also claimed the Russians probably had recordings of Hunter Biden because a hotel in Ukraine’s capital where he had stayed was “wired” and under their control — information he said was passed along to him by four high-level Russian officials.
But Hunter Biden had never traveled to Ukraine, according to Smirnov’s indictment.
Smirnov claimed to have contacts with Russian intelligence-affiliated officials, and told authorities after his arrest this year that “officials associated with Russian intelligence were involved in passing a story” about Hunter Biden.
The case against Smirnov was brought by special counsel David Weiss, who also prosecuted Hunter Biden on gun and tax charges. Hunter Biden was supposed to be sentenced this month after being convicted at a trial in the gun case and pleading guilty to federal charges in the tax case. But he was pardoned this month by his father, who said he believed “raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice.”
The FBI interviewed one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims four times over her allegation that Donald Trump assaulted her when she was underage.
Nathan Howard/Getty Images
The Department of Justice spoke four separate times to a woman who credibly accused Donald Trump of having sex with a minor he met through Jeffrey Epstein—but most accusations against the president appear to have been removed from the government’s documents on the alleged sex trafficker.
A 21-page slideshow buried in the massive trove of Epstein-related documents included allegations that sometime between 1983 and 1985, Trump forced a woman to give him oral sex when she was in her early teens. When the woman bit down on Trump’s exposed penis, he allegedly punched her in the head and kicked her out. That same woman told the DOJ that Epstein had introduced her to Trump in 1984.
Yet last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted that there was “no evidence” that Trump had committed any crime—adding to the growing pile of denials from Trump officials that constitute a sweeping cover-up of the president’s alleged wrongdoing.
Justice Department records indicate that the FBI spoke to this woman not once but at least four separate times, according to independent journalist Roger Sollenberger. Now those records appear to have been removed from public viewing—despite the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which requires all documents relating to the alleged sex trafficker to be made public.
Sollenberger discovered a record of four separate interviews, which took place in the summer of 2019, in a separate database of documents downloaded from the government’s public files on Epstein. That document indicated that the first of the four interviews was conducted on July 24, 2019, and the last conducted on October 16, 2019. That document was given to Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyers as part of her trial, though the specific allegations predated Maxwell’s involvement with Epstein, Sollenberger wrote.
The woman’s first interview was entered into the FBI’s case files on August 9, 2019, just one day before Epstein was found dead in his jail cell. FBI agents typically have a deadline of five working days to file interview write-ups, indicating an abnormal 16-day gap, Sollenberger noted.
A 5-year-old girl detained in Dilley drew herself and her family trapped in a cage.Credit: Courtesy / Eric Lee
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