Trump Seeks to Deport Ex-Chaplain at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital

CINCINNATI — In recent years, if you lived in the Queen City metropolitan area and your young child was severely ill, or dying of a terminal condition, chances are good that you encountered Ayman Soliman, who until recently was a Muslim chaplain at the renowned Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.

Whatever your faith or beliefs, he would have consoled you and your family in your darkest hours, in the kind of moment that every parent lives in abject terror of ever having to face. If you and your family were Muslim, the chaplain may have answered your questions about whether a do-not-resuscitate order for your child was permitted by the Quran. One former colleague of the imam recounts that specifically because of Soliman, there are poor members of the community who did not need to worry about paying for the funerals of their babies who didn’t make it out of the hospital alive.

Absolutely none of that matters to President Donald Trump and his administration, which is seeking to deport Soliman back to Egypt, where he and his advocates say he will be marked for death — in part due to his work as a journalist there in the midst of the Arab Spring.

Soliman was granted asylum during Trump’s first presidency. Ever since then, he says he’s been working to earn his American citizenship, and to bring his family to the United States to reunite with him. 

Two weeks ago, Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) took Soliman away, following a routine check-in at the Homeland Security facility in the Cincinnati suburb of Blue Ash. Since July 9, Soliman has been held at the Butler County jail, with the Trump administration proclaiming him to be an “Egyptian national [who] was flagged on the FBI terror watchlist.” 

His arrest has sparked a local uproar, with community and religious leaders and state and federal lawmakers rallying to his defense. A local bridge protest supporting Soliman ended in the arrests of more than a dozen people, including two journalists who were simply covering the event and now face charges of felony rioting.

On Tuesday morning, ahead of his bond hearing in his case, Soliman delivered Rolling Stone a brief message from behind bars, relayed by Tala Ali, a local friend and advocate for the imam. “I’m just hoping that I will get the due process that will bring me my life back,” he said. “I hope the court will correct the big terrible mistake that the [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services] made. I’m confident I have a very solid case, and should have asylum to save my life. This is a terrible mistake and I hope the terrible mistake that the USCIS made will be corrected. It’s been a very difficult time.” 

Ali says that “when we hung up, he said he was going to prepare for court and go pray.” Ali adds that “the first day he got to the jail, he asked what accommodations they had for Muslims,” and that in the time since, “he’s been advocating for kosher and halal meals. There was someone in another block there, facing criminal allegations, who wanted to see a chaplain, and Ayman wasn’t able to see them, but behind a wall and door, the two of them talked for an hour.” 

Multiple associates say that Soliman has told them recently that if he gets out and is allowed to remain in Ohio, he wants to go back regularly to this Butler County jail to help as a chaplain.

His advocates say bond was not granted Tuesday afternoon, and another hearing was set for next week; the former Cincinnati Children’s chaplain will remain in jail for now. 

The advocates add that the lawyer for Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) argued in court that the immigration judge had no jurisdiction over this matter and could not make a ruling one way or another. The government’s attorney brought up the “terror” list flags, which Soliman’s attorneys say are unfounded, evidence-free smears on their client. The Trump administration argues that Soliman’s legal status was revoked because of alleged Muslim Brotherhood connections. Egypt’s leader Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, whom Trump once called “my favorite dictator,” has ruthlessly targeted the Islamist organization, and personally advised Trump to designate it as a terrorist group, as well.

“The group that Mr. Soliman worked for is not connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, is not a terrorist organization, and does in fact provide charitable works in Egypt,” Robert Ratliff, one of his lawyers, said this week. Soliman’s team previously stated that “he faces death if forced to return to Egypt.”

“The Department of Homeland Security [on Tuesday] did not present any evidence in court to support its claim that Ayman provided material support to a terrorist organization,” Nazly Mamedova, another attorney for Soliman, writes in a statement to Rolling Stone. 

“Furthermore, in the updated Notice to Appear (NTA), DHS removed any reference to Ayman providing such support,” she continues, adding: “We hope that the immigration judge will reject the government’s baseless accusations and grant Ayman’s release on bond while his proceedings continue.” 

Soliman, who has been living and working in the U.S. and seeking citizenship for more than a decade, has long maintained that he faces serious danger, or death, from Egypt’s repressive government if he’s sent back. He, his advocates, and his legal team say that the federal claims of “terrorism” or Muslim Brotherhood connections are possibly or in part rooted in a case of mistaken identity, an assertion Soliman has already attempted to hash out in court. 

Close associates of Soliman raise the point that it would be bizarre for an actual terrorist operative to, by his own accord, file a lawsuit challenging the FBI on the terror-list flags, because that would draw more public attention to himself and his activities. And if the Trump administration’s accusations are true, that would suggest that Kash Patel’s FBI and Attorney General Pam Bondi allowed a dangerous terrorist to roam freely around Cincinnati during the opening six months of the Trump administration.

“He deserves his due process and his day in court. There are questions that need to be answered, and they should be. But if the FBI actually thought this guy was such a threat, then why didn’t they pick him up in the past seven months? Why is he in ICE custody now, and not the bureau’s, if that’s the case?” says Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio), who has been in touch with Soliman’s team since before his arrest. “For what it’s worth, from everything I’ve heard from people who know him — including a neighbor who took the time to walk a letter over to me, about how he helped her and her family when their child was at Children’s — it sounds like he is a decent man who is cared about deeply by much of the community here.”

Since his July 9 arrest, Rolling Stone spoke to numerous individuals — legislators, activists, those who worked with him at Cincinnati Children’s, attorneys, longtime Jewish, Muslim, and Christian residents of the area, family members of sick kids who got to know Soliman — familiar with this man and his local work, in and out of the medical center. None of them can square what Trump’s government is claiming, that this imam is a potential national-security threat who needs to be jailed then deported, with the person they know.

When asked about the Trump administration’s “terrorist” claims against Soliman, several of his friends and local associates say it’s all “bullshit” — and that if he really is some sort of Islamist sleeper agent, then he’s been failing miserably at the gig.

“If he’s a terrorist then he’s the worst terrorist imaginable; he’s a bullshit terrorist. He’s very bad at his job then,” says Rev. Elizabeth Diop, who until recently worked as a fellow chaplain at Cincinnati Children’s. “Every word that you’ve read about him from people who know him is a true word. He would do anything for you. Even in fucking detention, he’s counseling people who are locked up right now. He’s providing spiritual care; he’s the chaplain of his unit right now. He needs to be alive. He’s got work to do here, he’s got work to do to help heal the world.”

Diop says she was recently fired from the hospital after speaking to a local news outlet and thus apparently violating the medical center’s strict rules on granting unauthorized interviews to the media. She says she doesn’t regret her decision and that she feels compelled to keep speaking out publicly in support of Soliman.

“Ayman’s worth it. I lost my job, I kept my soul,” she says.

One parent, who asked not to be named, says that Soliman was there for their family at Cincinnati Children’s when their small child was fighting a grave illness. “I would have fallen to pieces without Ayman,” this Cincinnati-area parent says. “We need more people like him, not less … If Donald Trump wants him out, then who is good enough to stay?”

A nurse who works at Children’s and knows Soliman corroborates that “his main thing that I’m aware of is working with families and the patients in the ICU, when there’s a decision to be made that could lead to the child’s demise … It really aids in our ability to care for those children.”

The nurse continues that Soliman was “where he was meant to be. Some people back away from those situations because they’re hard and nobody wants to have to go through them — but he was a person who wanted to go in the opposite direction.” The nurse, like so many other current and former hospital staffers, says the medical personnel and employees at Cincinnati Children’s “overwhelmingly want him back,” and that he played a “vital role” in literal life-or-death situations.

Diop adds that over the course of four years, she had seen him work with unwell kids on various occasions, including with children suffering from mental illness and PTSD, or who had “been through terrible trauma, or often not had a safe and stable adult in their world.”

“A lot of people in the outside world looked at these kids like they were aliens,” she says. “But he never did. He looked at them as beloved children of God, you could tell he treasured them. You never had to translate the kids for Ayman, he just understood.”

One of the people most intimately familiar with the imam’s work is Marc Zumhagen, an ex-colleague of Soliman’s and formerly a longtime overnight chaplain at Cincinnati Children’s. “I worked with Ayman every day and we would get coffee several times a week,” Zumhagen says in an interview with Rolling Stone, adding that “conservatively,” he would estimate that Soliman worked on cases involving “15-30 deaths of children every year.”

When asked what kind of man Soliman is, and what his work meant to people who came through or staffed the hospital, Zumhagen tells the story of one child, about eight-years-old, who was at Cincinnati Children’s in the latter half of the Biden era. Zumhagen had also been in the room for much of this family’s horrific ordeal.

According to Zumhagen, following a terrible condition, subsequent infections, and procedures that weren’t working to save the kid’s life, the parents were, of course, in a miserable state as their child was “on the verge of death.” As the parents attempted to figure out what to do, the doctors and medical staff presented the family with a choice: They could authorize “very drastic treatment” with likely little hope of success, or they could end care.

It was the middle of the night. “That’s when I called Ayman,” the hospital’s former overnight chaplain recalls, as “these parents feel like they’re holding a gun to their own kid’s head.”

Zumhagen says, “I believe they were a Muslim, Arabic-speaking family, and the look of relief on the family’s face when Ayman came in was instant. Sometimes, when you’re in that room sitting with the doctors, it can feel hostile, just in the way you’re seated, even if it’s of course not meant to. But Ayman had this remarkable way of coming in and sitting next to the family, even if he had to move furniture. He just had this way of connecting with the family, and translating things between the doctors and family in perfect Arabic.”

At that moment, as the family was weeping and agonizing over their decision, Zumhagen says that the parents wanted to “know what Islam says about this.” Then, not long after, came a point “where the conversation shifted and both parents both nodded their heads and there was this moment of peace in the room.” Zumhagen says he asked Soliman later what they discussed, and his friend said the parents asked “if Muhammad ever faced anything like this.” 

Soliman then reminded the family about the suffering Muhammad endured, as told in the pages of the Quran, and how awful it is to see a child go through such suffering. He reminded the family that ultimately, it’s not up to us: Some things are just “in Allah’s hands now and Allah has a path at the end of the day.” He assured the family that they would not be bad parents for not wanting their child to suffer anymore, and that they could make the decision not to pursue likely doomed, extreme measures and instead spend these last hours of the child’s life peacefully.

The family decided to withdraw care, Zumhagen says. “He gave them peace,” he adds. “I was there to take the patient to the morgue after, and Ayman stayed there to comfort the family the whole night, including by making sure food arrangements were taken care of for them, so they did not have to worry about that … I know he remained in touch with them, and followed up with them, because they wanted their child to be buried back home, so he had to work with the international liaison and funeral homes.”

Before our conversation ended, Zumhagen wanted to stress something else. He said that “there are so many deaths in the NICU,” meaning the neonatal intensive care unit at the medical center, and that “many who came were very poor folks — and it pained Ayman that these families would have to pay for funerals for their children.”

So, the overnight chaplain says, Soliman took it upon himself to do “a lot of research” and called different funeral homes in the area, and found one in Northern Kentucky that would do infant funerals free of charge. 

“That was a godsend to our poor NICU families who, here you are, grieving the death of these children — and not just your child but everything you thought they would be doing — and now you’re thinking about how you’re going to afford to bury them,” Zumhagen says. “Ayman didn’t want them to suffer through that … so, he did something about it.”

In the final weeks of the Biden administration, Soliman received word that the process had begun to rescind his asylum status. It was unclear why his status, which he’d had since 2018, was imperiled, though his team suspected it was due to issues stemming from the FBI flags or his lawsuit. In June, months after Trump was sworn back into office, Soliman’s asylum status was officially revoked, and he began to fear the worst. 

The situation with his status made it virtually impossible to work at Cincinnati Children’s, which has not listed him as a chaplain on its website for months. Lawyers and others close to his case say that they view his jailing as a direct consequence of the second Trump administration’s highly draconian, quota-obsessed crackdowns on both legal and illegal immigration.

At the very least, if Soliman had officially lost his asylum status under President Joe Biden (or, President Kamala Harris, had she won last year), attorneys and others close to Soliman say there would have been other contingencies that don’t seem to exist in this current system. Furthermore, they say, it’s hard to see why a different administration would insist on jailing the imam, especially for this long, or on immediately deporting him to Egypt.

For now, Soliman sits in jail, adding yet another single-digit to the daily quotas for arrests that the Trump White House has been aggressively leaning on the government to meet, whether the rounded-up have criminal records or not.

Today, there is the expected anger, along with the inevitable combination of despair and hope for his case, coming from his supporters and friends in Ohio and Kentucky. Rolling Stone asked some of them what they would say to President Trump, Ohio-born Vice President J.D. Vance, DHS secretary Kristi Noem, or White House policy architect Stephen Miller if they were sitting in front of them right now.

The aforementioned Cincinnati-area parent who requested anonymity candidly said she’d tell them all, “Fuck you,” and “you’re a disgrace.” Judy Ragsdale, who says she hired Soliman back when she served as the senior director of Pastoral Care at Cincinnati Children’s, says that “as a Christian minister, I’m deeply saddened by the cruel anti-Muslim actions of the country that I love.” Ragsdale sent that comment late Wednesday morning, as she sat at the Butler County jail “waiting to see Ayman,” she says.

Zumhagen, for his part, had only the following to say:
“I would tell them that it’s another act of cruelty, not only to Ayman but also to the community. It’s hurting American citizens and the city. But as much as I’d love to rant and rave to push that point to its very end, I can’t help but think about what Ayman would say to them which is: Hello, my friend. There are a lot of people who are hurting right now and they need our help — and we need to figure out how we can help them.”