BOULDER, Colo. — A federal judge issued an order Wednesday to prevent the deportation of the wife and five children of an Egyptian man charged in the firebombing attack in Boulder, Colorado.
U.S. District Judge Gordon P. Gallagher granted a request from the family of Mohamed Sabry Soliman to halt deportation proceedings of his wife and five children who were taken into federal custody Tuesday by U.S. immigration officials.
The family members have not been charged in the attack on a group demonstrating for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza. Soliman faces federal hate crime charges and state charges of attempted murder in the Sunday attack in downtown Boulder.
U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said Wednesday that they are being processed for removal proceedings. It’s rare that family members of a person accused of a crime are detained and threatened with deportation.
Soliman’s wife, 18-year-old daughter, two minor sons and two minor daughters all are Egyptian citizens, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement.
“We are investigating to what extent his family knew about this heinous attack, if they had knowledge of it, or if they provided support to it,” Noem said in a statement.
Noem also said federal authorities will immediately crack down on people who overstay their visas in response to the Boulder attack.
Soliman told authorities that no one, including his family, knew about his planned attack, according to court documents that, at times, spelled his name as “Mohammed.”
Earlier Wednesday, authorities raised the number of victims in the attack from 12 to 15, plus a dog.
Boulder County officials who provided the update said in a news release that the victims include eight women and seven men ranging in age from 25 to 88. The Associated Press on Wednesday sent an email to prosecutors seeking more details on the newly identified victims and the dog.
Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, had planned to kill all of the roughly 20 participants in Sunday’s demonstration at the popular Pearl Street pedestrian mall, but he threw just two of his 18 Molotov cocktails while yelling “Free Palestine,” police said. Soliman, an Egyptian man who federal authorities say has been living in the U.S. illegally, didn’t carry out his full plan “because he got scared and had never hurt anyone before,” police wrote in an affidavit.
According to an FBI affidavit, Soliman told police he was driven by a desire “to kill all Zionist people” — a reference to the movement to establish and protect a Jewish state in Israel. Authorities said he expressed no remorse about the attack.
A vigil is scheduled for Wednesday evening at the local Jewish community center.
Soliman was born in el-Motamedia, an Egyptian farming village in the Nile Delta province of Gharbia, about 120 kilometers (75 miles) north of Cairo, according to an Egyptian security official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to talk to the media.
Before moving to Colorado Springs three years ago, Soliman spent 17 years in Kuwait, according to court documents.
Soliman arrived in the U.S. in August 2022 on a tourist visa that expired in February 2023, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a post on X. She said Soliman filed for asylum in September 2022 and was granted a work authorization in March 2023, but that has also expired.
Hundreds of thousands of people overstay their visas each year in the United States, according to Department of Homeland Security reports.
