Children’s Hospital Chaplain Put in Isolation as ICE Tries to Deport

CINCINNATI — Since July 9, Ayman Soliman, who served for years as a Muslim chaplain at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, has been held at the Butler County jail in Ohio. His arrest by Donald Trump’s quota-obsessed ICE, during a routine federal check-in, sparked a local outcry, largely due to his well-established track record of comforting and working with the families of dying and severely ill children during his years at Cincinnati Children’s.

None of that matters to the Trump administration, which is fighting to deport Soliman back to Egypt while branding him a terrorist sympathizer. Soliman’s legal team say that such claims are a baseless smear that he has the evidence to rebut, and stresses that “he faces death if forced to return to Egypt.”

Shortly after he arrived at the jail early last month, the imam told friends that was trying to work as a de facto chaplain of the jail and counseling others behind bars there. He told his friends that some of the jail’s staff even said to him that if he’s released and allowed to stay in Ohio, that Soliman should return as an actual chaplain with the jail. 

But according to several of Soliman’s associates, as well as a habeas corpus petition filed by his legal team Thursday morning, something changed dramatically in recent weeks and the former children’s hospital chaplain was thrown into isolation, which at times also included “solitary confinement.” Friends say that these recent days of this detention have shredded the imam’s mental health.

“It felt like I was looking into the face of somebody who had just been tortured,” says Rev. Elizabeth Diop, who until recently also worked as a chaplain at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. Diop was fired from the hospital for violating the company media policy by speaking out in support of her fellow chaplain.

Diop tells Rolling Stone that she visited Soliman and spoke to him, via video screen at the jail, this past Sunday and the Sunday before that. During that interim week, Soliman was put into isolation, and Diop says she could easily see the toll it took on him. 

“He seemed disturbed. His eyes looked like he was in pain. He was talking really fast, and sounded despairing. I’d never seen him like that,” she says. “He said he was imagining being deported and being killed. He said he couldn’t sleep because his roommate was talking so much throughout the night. He said [the jail] wouldn’t let anybody talk to him through the door. He said he couldn’t order from the commissary and the food was really hard for him to eat. He said he was contemplating doing a hunger strike and I strongly discouraged that. I think he just was so hopeless he was just trying to think of anything he could do to try to fix things.”

Diop adds: “He said to me, and I’m paraphrasing here, that it seemed like they were trying to torture him into leaving rather than fighting to stay.”

Thursday’s public court filing (which you can read below in full) states that while “detained at Butler County Jail, Petitioner has been placed into segregated detention by agents of DHS and officers of the Butler County Sheriff’s Office,” and that this “custody placement was a result of targeted harassment due to Petitioner’s attempt to practice his religion.”

The document continues: “This segregated detention resulted in solitary confinement, denial of access to visitation, and restricted access to legal calls with counsel, with calls being limited to the period of 12:00 a.m. to 1:00 a.m. daily. Petitioner was placed under this confinement from on or about August 2, 2025, until August 5, 2025.”

Soliman’s advocates say that the document gives a conservative estimate of the length of the isolation period, which they say finally ended on Wednesday. Several on his team, including one of his attorneys Robert Ratliff, say Soliman was held in isolation at the jail for roughly “six days.” Ratliff notes that his understanding is that the isolation was originally slated to last 20 days, but that Soliman was allowed to “return to general population” early. The legal team is still searching for answers regarding the “targeted harassment” and what Soliman and his lawyers are calling out as an unwarranted punishment.

“He was seeking to pray with some other detainees. They were trying to pray in a common area that is open to all inmates. He was told that was not acceptable. That was the basis of the segregation,” Ratliff says, relaying Soliman’s account.

The Butler County Jail did not respond to a voicemail seeking comment on this story.

In the past week, different legal and political offices, including a U.S. congressman’s, were looped into the behind-the-scenes efforts to get Soliman released from isolation early. Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio) and his team were quietly involved in recent days: “We made calls and glad it got resolved,” the congressman says. “We’re hopeful that it doesn’t happen again.”

Adam Allen, another Cincinnati Children’s chaplain who was fired after publicly supporting his arrested former colleague, says he spoke to Soliman prior to his release from isolation, and tells Rolling Stone that “Ayman told me he filed a complaint every day since being put in isolation, and his complaint was escalated.” Allen recounts that when he spoke with his friend, “Ayman is  the kind of person who cares about other people before he cares about himself. He told me the last [several] days have been especially hard. … But then he asked me about me, and I tried to redirect it to him but then he just asked me how my son was doing, so I indulged him.”

Soon after, Allen says he asked Soliman how he could pray for him, to which the imam replied: “Allah would help me through this test.”

Asked what he would say to Trump or others involved with Soliman’s jailing, Allen responds: “Ayman is a paragon of the kind of person we want in this community, and that this has happened to him demonstrates the kind of cruelty that has been unjustly dealt to every immigrant. And that should be a wakeup call to reform the system in a way that is just and fair.”

Soliman’s advocates argue that the way he has been locked up and treated for the past month — including in the aggressive manner that the Trump administration, in and out of court, has wielded War on Terror-style propaganda against him — is yet another symptom of this government’s ultra-draconian crackdowns on legal immigration. The human cost of the past six months is already incalculable. And if Trump’s team gets its way on cases like Soliman’s, there could be massive potential for expanding the administration’s already staggering abuses and lawlessness.

“This is something that [the Department of Homeland Security] can do to anybody. I don’t care if you’re an asylee for 27 years or if you’ve become a U.S. citizen,” says Ratliff. “In this case, solely DHS initiated termination proceedings. DHS decided solely on their own that their evidence was good enough. DHS decided solely on their own that Ayman’s evidence wasn’t good enough. And DHS decided solely on its own that immigration courts don’t have jurisdiction because they’re throwing out these unsupported allegations that he’s a terrorist. … This means DHS can revoke anybody’s asylum, and do this to anybody. This is something that has far reaching potential consequences, if Ayman’s case is left to play out this way, and the courts don’t intervene and stop DHS from deporting him.”