The Colorado judge overseeing the federal criminal case against the man who last year carried out an antisemitic attack on Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall signaled Friday that he is prepared to block the deportation of the firebomber’s family.
Senior U.S. District Judge John Kane indicated in court that he would have the authority to intervene should the federal government re-arrest the ex-wife and children of Mohamed Soliman, the 46-year-old man who killed one woman and burned 13 others in the June 1 attack on Boulder’s popular pedestrian mall.
“There is one (matter) that is somewhat of a sleeping elephant and I just want to be candid about it,” Kane told attorneys. “The government of the United States is one party. One branch of that, (the) executive branch, has no right to interfere with the judicial functions of the court or the matters presented to it. And that I will not tolerate.
“If a certain branch of the federal government decides to arrest these people and take them away, I will entertain an immediate hearing,” he continued. “…I am trying to say that as respectfully as possible. We are closer to chaos in our system than we have ever been before, and I am trying to avoid that.”
Kane, who was born in 1937 and appointed to the bench by President Jimmy Carter in 1977, reiterated his prior stance that the government should not deport Soliman’s ex-wife and children, but again stopped short of formally ordering that they remain in the United States. He set the case to come back to court in late June for an update.
Soliman’s defense team has argued that the testimony of his ex-wife and children would be key to the case should federal prosecutors pursue the death penalty, and that deporting the family would likely violate Soliman’s constitutional rights.
Federal prosecutors have not yet decided whether they will pursue the death penalty in the hate-crimes case. Soliman pleaded guilty to murder and related crimes in state court this month and was sentenced to life in prison.
He has offered to plead guilty in the federal case if prosecutors take the death penalty off the table. If the government pursues capital punishment, his attorneys expect his family to offer critical mitigating testimony.
Federal prosecutor Melissa Hindman said Friday that the family’s immigration proceedings would require at least 30 days’ notice before they are deported, and that countdown has not yet started. She suggested that any action on the family’s pending immigration proceedings could take as long as 90 days.
Both the prosecution and defense expect to take advantage of that at least 30-day window to connect with the family, they said.
The Trump administration has aggressively pursued the deportation of Soliman’s ex-wife, Hayam El Gamal, and the couple’s five children since the attack. When El Gamal and the children were taken into immigration custody two days after the Boulder attack, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem vowed online that the family would be deported “as early as tonight.”
The family instead spent 10 months in a Texas detention facility before they were briefly released in April, then taken back into custody, then released again — all within the span of four days. El Gamal and Soliman divorced in April.
During his sentencing in state court, Soliman urged federal authorities to impose the death penalty and apologized for the attack.
Soliman used a makeshift flamethrower and Molotov cocktails to burn people who had gathered on Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall for a weekly demonstration urging the release of Israeli hostages held in Gaza after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas. One woman, 82-year-old Karen Diamond, was killed.
