In a powerful statement released on January 6, 2026, 18-year-old Habiba Soliman has detailed the ongoing illegal detention of her family at the hands of the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Habiba, along with her mother and four siblings—including 5-year-old twins, a 9-year-old, and a 16-year-old—have been held in a Texas detention facility for seven months following an attack carried out by her father in Boulder, Colorado on a pro-Israeli hostage rally on June 1, 2025.

Habiba’s statement provides a devastating exposure of the Trump administration’s use of collective punishment in violation of fundamental democratic rights. Habiba says, “To the authorities, we are guilty only by association. They don’t see us as individuals with our own dreams. We are six innocent people-including five-year-old twins-trapped in a nightmare we didn’t create and punished for our father’s actions.”

She describes how her family had spent three years working to integrate into American society, volunteering in food drives and teaching English to other immigrants. “Finally, after 3 years of hard work, we were all relatively settled,” she writes. “Then, the worst nightmare that none of us could have expected or even imagined came into our life.”

The “nightmare” began when her father, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, a 45-year-old Egyptian national and Uber driver, carried out a firebombing attack on a pro-Israel demonstration in Boulder. Using a homemade flamethrower and Molotov cocktails, Soliman targeted a group called “Run for Their Lives,” focused on Israelis taken captive by Hamas.

The attack left approximately 12 to 15 people injured, some with severe burns. According to court documents and video footage, Soliman shouted “End Zionists” and “Free Palestine,” later telling authorities he “hated this group and needed to stop them from taking over ‘our land.’”

The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) has consistently opposed individual acts of violence such as that carried out by Mohamed Soliman and explained that they serve only to disorient the working class and provide the state with a pretext to escalate police-state repression.

Habiba herself condemns the violence in her statement, writing:

We believe that what happened to the victims of the attack is dreadful. That no one ever should experience what they have experienced. Violence is never justified. And we condemn every one that uses violence including my father.

She emphasizes that her family had no knowledge of his plans, noting that her father was a “man of few words” who “never changed and ... never opened up to anybody.” Despite their innocence, the Soliman family was seized by ICE on June 3, 2025.

Habiba describes the terrifying treatment by DHS officers during the transition from their home to the Dilley detention facility in Texas:

Just like other people, we were lied to by DHS and ICE agents. On the third day, they told us that staying in the hotel was dangerous and that we should go to another hotel for our safety. ... We drove for an hour to Florence still believing that we were going to a hotel. To our surprise we arrived at a place in the middle of nowhere.

We drove into a garage and watched it close behind us. We felt trapped. We thought we got kidnapped. ... The ICE agents didn’t show their badges or identify themselves at all until we got inside and saw the holding cells. They took our phones and all of our property, and we stayed for more than 8 hours in a cold cell. It was the beginning of the end.

Habiba recounts the trauma of watching ICE agents use physical force against another detainee, an experience that terrified her young siblings:

The twins were only 4 years old then and they were crying hysterically. ... [the agents] told us that they would only use that type of force with us if we refused to follow their orders.

Once transferred to the facility in Texas, the conditions did not improve. As Habiba writes:

We have been fighting and struggling to get the most basic things like food, medicine and even clothes. It was surprising to see the amount of heartless people that worked in the facility. ... the truth is that only 10 percent of these officers have ever treated us like humans. ... The officers talk arrogantly and treat the residents like they are nothing, as if just because we are detained, we are not humans anymore.

Their actions would be anywhere from eating lollipops and candy in front of the little kids, knowing that they all want some but can never get any.

She further details the medical neglect and physical exhaustion defining their lives:

Our whole day is spent running from one line to the next; they manage to keep us very busy waiting that by the end of the day, we have no energy left. ... My brother himself had appendicitis, and when he went to the medical department, he wasn’t even seen by a doctor. ... He was finally taken to actually be seen after he threw up in the waiting room and begged the nurse that he couldn’t even walk from the pain.

Habiba herself has spent four months without glasses.

The detention of the Soliman family is a flagrant violation of democratic principles and constitutes “collective punishment,” a practice that is a hallmark of police-state dictatorships.

Eric Lee, an attorney for the family, told the WSWS that the Trump administration’s actions echo the methods of Nazi Germany, specifically the use of kin punishment, or Sippenhaft, to intimidate the population. Though federal judges in Colorado and Texas issued temporary restraining orders (TROs) to block the family’s immediate deportation, the administration has continued to hold them without a fair trial.

Habiba describes the mockery of justice they faced in court:

After waiting for 7 months, we didn’t even get a fair trial. ... [The judge] denied our request for more time and forced us to proceed ‘pro se’ violating our right to due process. ... To deny our case for a minor error, without a lawyer present, is not the justice we were promised.

This treatment is part of the campaign by the Trump administration to demonize immigrants and escalate the powers of the ICE gestapo. Following the Boulder attack, the White House official X account engaged in a fascistic spectacle, posting Mohamed’s mugshot with the caption: “Six One-Way Tickets for Mohamed’s Wife and Five Kids. Final Boarding Call Coming Soon. ✈️”. Such rhetoric is designed to justify mass deportation operations and intimidate and suppress political opposition to it.

The assault on the Soliman family is directed against both immigrants and those who actively oppose the assault on immigrant rights. The shooting death by an ICE agent on January 7 of Renee Nicole Good—a 37-year-old mother who actively opposed the attacks on immigrants in Minneapolis—is the deadliest in a series of assaults by federal agents on political opposition.

Since Soliman’s violent attack in June, the Trump administration has seized on it not only to punish an innocent family, but to slander all opposition to its policies—and the US-backed genocide in Gaza—as “antisemitic.” In the case of Good, her murder by ICE has been justified on the grounds that she was a “domestic terrorist.”

In the final portion of her statement, Habiba emphasizes the importance of the truth and the necessity of speaking out against the Trump government’s attack on the family’s rights:

I don’t know when or how our detention will end. I don’t know if it’s a happy or a sad ending. I don’t know how we will deal with the effects that this place imposed on us. ... But I know one thing: the truth never dies. We just need more people who are willing to spend the time and effort to find it.

I just hope that when the truth comes out that it is not too late and that the damage is fixable. We are fighting because we know we are innocent. What happened is terrible but there is no point in destroying the life of six innocent humans. We pray for someone to look at us not as the family of a man who is accused of terrorism, but as humans who deserve to live freely.

As the WSWS has warned, if the US government is permitted to impose collective punishment based on the actions of a relative, there is nothing to prevent the state from using these same powers against strikers, protesters and all political opponents of the regime. The fight for the freedom of the Soliman family is the fight for the democratic rights of the entire working class.