Judge orders release of Texas detention center mother, five children after 10 months

A federal judge ordered the release of Hayam El Gamal and her five children after they spent more than 10 months inside the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, the longest detention known for any family there. The ruling put a hard edge on a case that has become a test of how far the nation’s family detention system can go before it runs into legal limits and basic standards of care.

The family had been held since June 2025, with the children ranging in age from 5 to 18, including 5-year-old twins. Their confinement followed the arrest of their father, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, after an alleged firebombing attack in Boulder, Colorado. Federal prosecutors charged Soliman with a hate crime and more than 100 state counts, while the family has said it had no knowledge of the attack.

The detention drew unusual scrutiny because Dilley is the country’s only federal immigrant detention center authorized to hold parents with children. Court monitors and advocates have said many children there were kept beyond the roughly 20-day period generally associated with Flores-related limits, raising questions about whether the government has stretched family detention beyond the practical and legal assumptions that were meant to restrain it.

Those questions had already surfaced inside the immigration court system. In September 2025, an immigration judge ruled that the family could be released on a $15,000 bond, citing that they had entered the United States on tourist visas three years earlier, had no criminal record and had gathered strong community support while pursuing asylum. Yet U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement kept the family in custody.

The family’s own account of life at Dilley added to the pressure. In March 2026, they submitted 59 pages of declarations, letters and drawings to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee describing moldy food, worms in meals, inadequate medical care and a disregard for Muslim religious accommodations. One 16-year-old wrote that the prolonged detention was “slowly killing us on the inside.”

Children’s Rights said in April 2026 that the family remained detained despite the earlier release order, and argued that the case raised due process concerns over ICE’s tactics. NBC reported in March 2026 that hundreds of children held with their parents at Dilley had been confined longer than the period generally allowed under federal court rules.

The judge’s order sharpened the stakes for the Biden-era debate over detention standards? Actually under President Donald Trump’s second administration, it underscored how a facility built for family custody has become a flashpoint over whether immigration enforcement is now punishing children for indefinite stretches that the law was meant to prevent.