On Tuesday the legal team for Hayam El Gamal and her five children released a statement detailing the Trump administration’s illegal attempt last Saturday to deport the family in defiance of federal court orders. It is not an exaggeration to state that the El Gamal family has been tortured for nearly 11 months by the US government, and last Saturday’s illegal rendition attempt was just the latest example.
The statement, issued by attorney Eric Lee, recounts that El Gamal and her children had been released from the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley on Thursday, April 23, after nearly 11 months in detention. They returned to Colorado and reported Saturday morning for what ICE officers allegedly told them would be a check-in lasting no longer than “five minutes.”
Instead, the family was separated from their attorney, taken behind locked doors, surrounded by armed agents and told, “you are being deported today.”
The lawyers stated that the family protested, explaining that their deportation was barred by court order, but ICE officers replied that “they didn’t care.” The family, which includes an 18-year-old, a 16-year-old, a nine-year-old and two five-year-old twins, were then rushed into a van and driven at roughly 90 miles an hour to Denver International Airport. “The children were not put in car seats or seatbelts,” the statement said. “One child said they were going to be sick and the officer said ‘throw up on the floor.’”
At the airport, the family was taken onto the tarmac, where a private jet contracted by Air Wisconsin was waiting. The legal team noted that the timing indicates that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began planning to re-detain and deport the family from the moment a federal court ordered their release. The family was able to call their lawyers from the tarmac and provide the plane’s tail number before the call was abruptly cut off.
On the flight El Gamal and her children were subjected to verbal abuse and medical neglect. A nurse took El Gamal’s blood pressure and found it was dangerously high, but ICE contractors still refused to allow her or the children to unbuckle their seat belts. At one point, a contractor physically restrained El Gamal from touching her seat belt in front of her children. One of the children suffered a panic attack during the flight.
The plane was ultimately turned around in midair after federal judges in Texas and Colorado issued emergency orders barring the deportation. The family was held for a prolonged period at Willow Run Airport in Michigan before being flown back to Denver and released to community supporters.
Chris Godshall-Bennett, one of the family’s attorneys, denounced the operation in an interview with NPR. “I’m afraid to let them out of my sight,” he said from Colorado, while El Gamal’s children played nearby. “They were treated like animals. ICE took children into their custody in violation of a court order and flew them around the country for eight hours. There’s a word for that. It’s kidnapping. The government’s behavior yesterday was entirely beyond the pale.” NPR reported that DHS did not confirm the re-detention and did not address the allegation that it had violated Judge Fred Biery’s order.
Instead, DHS spokeswoman Lauren Bis slandered the family, declaring, “Mohammed Soliman is a terrorist responsible for an anti-Semitic firebombing in Boulder. The family received full due process and was issued a final order of removal on December 29, 2025.” Bis attacked Biery as an “activist judge appointed by Bill Clinton” and said the administration would continue seeking the removal of “terrorists and their associates.” The FBI has confirmed that El Gamal nor have any of her five children participated in or had knowledge that Soliman would attack the pro-Israel event.
The attempt to kidnap and deport the El Gamal family took place as congressional Republicans, with the Democrats’ assistance through the broader DHS funding maneuver, are preparing a massive new infusion of money for the immigration Gestapo. According to the Senate Judiciary Committee reconciliation text released Monday night, the bill would provide $30.7 billion for ICE through Fiscal Year 2029 and another $22.57 billion to hire, train, pay and equip Customs and Border Protection personnel through Fiscal Year 2029.
Together, those two items alone amount to more than $53 billion for the expansion of the immigration Gestapo, the largest portion of the reported $70 billion enforcement package. The money would run through 2029, more than a year after Trump is supposed to have left office, underscoring that what is being built is not a temporary “border security” operation but a permanent mass paramilitary organization loyal to the “America First” fascist agenda.
The Judiciary panel’s legislation also provides $2.5 billion to the Teamsters-endorsed Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin and $1 billion to the Secret Service to make “security adjustments and upgrades” to the White House compound, including Trump’s planned ballroom and underground security bunker.
The meaning of this money was spelled out Tuesday by Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” speaking before an audience of DHS officials and private contractors at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix. “If you think last year’s historic number was good, wait until next year, when we have 10,000 agents. … You ain’t seen s*** yet,” Homan declared. “Mass deportations are coming.”
Homan made the role of private contractors even clearer in an interview with CBS Tuesday, when he explained that the temporary slowdown in deportations during the partial DHS shutdown was not due to any retreat by the administration but to the interruption of payments to the contractors who make the operation possible. “ICE agents may be getting paid, but our contractors aren’t,” Homan said. He identified these contractors as “the people who do the targeting,” adding that they “do all that work that make it possible for us to go look for people.”
The Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign is a public-private kidnapping apparatus: Federal agents carry out the raids, but the surveillance, data mining and target selection are increasingly outsourced to corporations and contractors paid out of the federal treasury.
The threats by Homan and the billions being funneled into ICE, CBP and private security and prison contractors are directed against the entire working class, regardless of immigration status. The El Gamal case shows that the Trump administration is prepared to violate court orders, seize children and attempt illegal removals against people who have committed no crime.
The capitalist nation-state arose historically to create and defend national markets, common laws, currencies and political structures through which the bourgeoisie could protect its property and accumulate capital. But capitalist production long ago outgrew the national framework. Globalized production has bound workers on every continent into a single world economy, while the nation-state system now survives as a machinery of borders, prisons, deportations, war and dictatorship.
Under socialism, the immense productive powers created by the international working class would be freed from the irrational division of the world into rival capitalist states and reorganized on the basis of human need, democratic planning and international cooperation. The struggle against deportations and dictatorship is therefore inseparable from the fight for the socialist unity of the working class across all borders.
The vast new sums being handed to ICE and CBP will be used not only against immigrants but against all political opposition to the financial oligarchy and its representatives in Washington. The defense of democratic rights, including the right not to be kidnapped by armed agents of the state, is a class question. It requires the independent mobilization of the working class against both political parties and the nation-state system.