Federal Judge Orders Release of Egyptian Migrant Hayam El-Gamal and Five Children From ICE Detention

A federal judge in Texas ordered the release of an Egyptian migrant, Hayam El-Gamal, and her five children on April 23 after they had been held since June 2025 at the Dilley family detention center of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Dilley.

“A longtime Texas court interpreter who is being held in a federal detention center after being detained by federal immigration agents says that her arrest and detention have been a degrading experience”

Bitacora.uy

The France 24 account says the six had been slated for deportation by Donald Trump and that the Trump administration kept them behind bars for 10 months through legal maneuvers that prevented the implementation of a court order for their release on bail issued in September 2025.

France 24

France 24 also describes how El-Gamal’s ex-husband and the father of the children, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, threw two incendiary bombs in June 2025 at a Boulder, Colorado protest calling for the release of Israeli hostages then in Hamas hands, an attack that left 13 people injured, including an 82-year-old woman who died shortly after from the burns she suffered.

The same article says El-Gamal and her children managed to get a federal judge to block their immediate deportation because they had an asylum case pending, even though it did not prevent their confinement in the detention center.

Reuters is not included in the provided sources for this topic, so the only quoted voices in this section come from France 24’s account of the case, including the family’s statement that "We are six innocent people."

Meenu Batra, a longtime Texas court interpreter, told ABC News that after ICE detained her on March 17 at the Valley International Airport while she was en route to Milwaukee for a work assignment, her arrest and detention felt like a degrading experience.

Bitacora.uy is not included in the provided sources for this topic, so the section relies on the account in Bitacora.uy’s source block about Batra’s detention at the El Valle Detention Center in Raymondville, Texas and her description of what happened at the TSA checkpoint and afterward.

La Presse

Batra said an ICE officer asked, "Do you know you are here illegally?" and she replied, "No," before she was handcuffed and taken to a white unmarked SUV.

Her attorney, Deepak Ahluwalia, said Batra has lived in the United States for about 35 years and has a "suspension of removal" order that prevents her deportation to her homeland, India, because of fear of persecution.

In response to her account, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said, "Meenu received a final deportation order from an immigration mediator in 2000," and that she would remain in ICE custody during the delay of her deportation.

The New Yorker describes how, in early February, Elora Mukherjee told the author about a client detained in South Texas during a medical crisis, with Baby Amalia transported to a hospital in San Antonio with critically low oxygen levels and watched by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) while in intensive care.

“A Canadian woman and her 7-year-old daughter, who had been held by ICE in Texas for three weeks, were released Thursday, according to an independent British Columbia MLA”

La Presse

After being discharged, the child was sent back to the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, where the New Yorker says doctors prescribed a nebulizer treatment but "when the girl and her mother returned to Dilley, the officers took away those medications."

The New Yorker also quotes Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center, saying, "The through-line is a strategic, coordinated effort directed specifically at children."

It further says a report published on April 1 by Human Rights First and RAICES offers an analysis of what they call a "new era of ICE family prisons," based on interviews with thirty-five families and more than three hundred asylum-seeker cases RAICES has represented.

The New Yorker adds that the report describes widespread medical neglect of children under the care of CoreCivic, and it states that the daily average population at Dilley exceeded nine hundred people in January and then fell to fewer than one hundred by mid-March before rising again.