Attorneys for the family of the Boulder terror suspect, who are currently detained in an immigration center in Texas, claim one of the children was neglected during a medical emergency and continues to be mistreated.
A press release put out in a post on the social media platform X on Thursday from immigration attorney Eric Lee said that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “delayed the child’s transfer to a local hospital,” during what he called a “life-threatening emergency.”
The family is currently detained at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, after being picked up in Colorado on June 3, two days after the Boulder terror attack.
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Denver7 Investigates reached Lee on Friday to get more information on what happened.
He did not disclose which child was ill and what illness they had, only that it required surgery. His post said it was more than 24 hours between when symptoms were first reported to when the surgery was performed.
When asked about the timeline, Lee said that the family first reported that the child was ill around 9:30 a.m. Sunday. He said it wasn’t until the child collapsed and began vomiting that they and the mother were taken to a nearby medical clinic, which is not operated by ICE, sometime in the early afternoon.
Then, Lee said it then took roughly six hours for an ambulance to arrive to take them to a hospital in San Antonio, nearly an hour-and-a-half away. By the time they arrived there, he says they had to wait until the next day for surgery.
“There's absolutely no reason why it should take six hours to get an ambulance to a facility when a child is going through an emergency that could impact their entire future health,” Lee said.
Denver7 Investigates asked Lee about why it would be ICE’s responsibility to get an ambulance to a health facility that the public also uses.
“I think that would be a question for ICE,” he said. “But when ICE is legally responsible for someone's health because they are in, they are in their custody, it is their obligation to make sure that that person's cries for help are not ignored.”
Lee's post also claimed that the child's mother was only permitted 60 seconds to call her other children still at the facility.
In the post, he said the child is back at the detention facility, but is not getting their medication promptly. Lee is now calling for the family's release from detention.
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Denver7 Investigates reached out to ICE for a statement, but has not yet gotten a response.
Mohamed Sabry Soliman, the husband and father of the child in this ongoing immigration case, is facing more than 180 state felonies and 12 federal hate crime charges related to the June 1 terror attack that injured 14 people and killed one.
The wife and five children are Egyptian nationals and were taken into ICE custody in the days following the attack. According to federal court documents, the wife was awaiting the approval of a work visa. They were then taken to Texas because Denver's ICE facility does not have any family-unit housing.
The South Texas Family Residential Center can hold up to 2,400 people and reopened earlier this year after it closed in 2024 under the Biden administration.
When the family was first picked up, a social media account for the White House noted that the family was facing expedited removal, but last week a federal judge in Texas said the family is now going through the normal immigration court process.
Lee said dates for those hearings are still pending.
