After the firebomb attack in Colorado that injured 12 people on Sunday, President Donald Trump blamed his predecessor’s “ridiculous Open Border Policy” for allowing the entry of Mohamed Sabry Soliman, the Egyptian national now charged with a federal hate crime. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller denounced “suicidal” U.S. immigration policies, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that Soliman’s wife and five children had been taken into immigration custody and would be swiftly deported.
The attack, for Trump and his top aides, quickly became an opportunity to convert an act of anti-Semitic violence into a justification for the president’s mass-deportation campaign; they depicted the incident as another example of American lives threatened by permissive immigration policies. But the reality of Soliman’s arrival to the United States and his immigration status—based on what has been publicly revealed by the administration so far—isn’t as straightforward as Trump officials have made it sound.
The administration’s labeling of Soliman as an “illegal alien” is a mischaracterization of the gray area he inhabited in the U.S. asylum system, in which applicants can spend years in legal limbo waiting for their case to be decided. He arrived in 2022 not over the southern border, as Trump suggested, but on a visa that was also widely given out to Egyptian nationals during Trump’s first term. The administration has not said what exactly it believes the Biden administration failed to catch in vetting Soliman’s visa application.
Trump cited the Colorado attack yesterday when he announced a ban on travelers from 12 countries—a list that did not include Egypt. “The recent terror attack in Boulder, Colorado, has underscored the extreme dangers posed to our country by the entry of foreign nationals who are not properly vetted, as well as those who come here as temporary visitors and overstay their visas,” Trump said in a video message. “We don’t want them.”
[Bruce Hoffman: The Boulder attack didn’t come out of nowhere]
Months before the Boulder attack, Trump had already ordered U.S. consulates to intensify screening of visa applicants, including scouring their social-media accounts, for evidence of anti-Semitism and “anti-American” beliefs or opinions, citing the threat of acts like the one Soliman is accused of committing against a group of demonstrators marching in support of Israeli hostages.
Whether Soliman arrived with hateful views or adopted them during his time in the United States will be part of the investigation. After he was taken into custody—shirtless, ranting, and reeking of gasoline—Soliman told FBI agents that he’d been wanting to carry out the attack for a year but waited until his daughter graduated high school.
Soliman, 45, entered the United States on a B-2 visa—typically for tourism or family visits—then promptly applied for asylum with his wife and children, according to the Department of Homeland Security. With a pending claim in U.S. immigration court, Soliman received U.S. work authorization, joining millions of others who entered the United States during the record migration influx of President Joe Biden’s first three years in office. (Camilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS News reported on Tuesday that the Trump administration is now considering blocking asylum seekers from getting work permits.)
The number of visitor visas issued by the State Department at the time was still low relative to pre-pandemic levels and building back up from its nadir in 2021. The United States issued 52,400 nonimmigrant visas to Egyptian nationals during the 2022 fiscal year, government records show, fewer than the roughly 62,000 a year granted during the pre-pandemic years of Trump’s first term.
The year Soliman arrived, it was relatively easy for Egyptian applicants to secure a visitor visa. About 23 percent of Egyptian applications for nonimmigration B visas were rejected in 2022, lower than the roughly 32 to 34 percent average during the pre-pandemic years of Trump’s term. That changed over the course of Biden’s term, and by the 2024 fiscal year, the rejection rate for Egyptian applications was 40 percent.
When a foreign visitor arrives with a short-term visa such as the B-2 and fails to depart, the State Department counts it as an overstay. The overstay rate for Egyptians has been about 2 to 4 percent annually, State Department records show. That rate jumped to 8 percent in 2022, the year Soliman arrived—amid a broader surge in visa overstays that year—then returned to 4 percent in 2023.
Noem ordered an “urgent crackdown” yesterday on overstays of visas issued during the Biden administration, declaring in a statement that this was an effort to remove “the rest of the world’s terrorist sympathizers.”
Soliman and his family lived in Kuwait for 17 years prior to his arrival, and it’s not clear whether he applied for a visa as an Egyptian or a Kuwaiti. Kuwait is a far more prosperous and stable country than Egypt, and the overstay rate for Kuwaiti nationals is only about 1 percent. DHS officials did not respond to questions seeking additional information about Soliman’s immigration record.
Soliman’s work-authorization document expired in March, according to DHS, and it’s not clear why he failed to renew it. The lapse meant that it would have been illegal for Soliman to work, but the change would not have affected his immigration status, which was tied to his pending asylum claim and not to the work document, according to Paul Hunker, the former lead counsel for ICE in Dallas.
Hunker told us that someone like Soliman, with a pending asylum claim, would not have been a priority for ICE during previous administrations, including Trump’s first term, absent a separate criminal arrest. “ICE could try to deport the person, but they could go to immigration court and assert protection, and a judge would make the decision,” Hunker said.
Hunker added that it is unusual for ICE to arrest an offender’s spouse and children in response to a crime and to threaten immediate deportation. The agency cannot use its fast-track deportation authority known as “expedited removal” to remove those who entered the United States with a visa, he said. DHS did not respond to questions about its plans to deport Soliman’s wife and children.
The October 7, 2023, terrorist attack by Hamas—and the devastation of Gaza by the Israeli response—occurred after Soliman had reached the United States and sought asylum.
Since then, Jewish Americans have faced a surge of anti-Semitic rhetoric and a recent series of violent attacks.
Prosecutors have not said whether they’ve found social-media posts by Soliman threatening violence, and investigators say that he was not on the radar of local police. On Sunday, Soliman disguised himself as a gardener to approach his victims, they said, and had fashioned crude firebombs using glass jars and garden tools that included a pump sprayer filled with gasoline.
As Trump and his aides assessed what to say and do after the Boulder attack, they decided to use the incident to push the administration’s case for an aggressive mass-deportation campaign, White House officials told us. In recent weeks, Trump’s poll numbers on immigration—arguably his signature issue—have slipped, as courts blocked some of his policies and many Americans deemed his administration’s in-your-face tactics, including sending migrants to a hellish megaprison in El Salvador, too extreme.
Trump has been frustrated that deportations are not on pace to set records, as he’d promised. Miller, the architect of his immigration crackdown, has ordered ICE to increase arrests more than fourfold, to a minimum of 3,000 people a day.
[Read: We’re about to find out what mass deportation really looks like]
Trump was updated on the Colorado attack in real time, much like he was on two other high-profile recent incidents of anti-Semitic violence, according to two White House officials. But his public reaction was strikingly different when the alleged perpetrator was an immigrant.
Shortly after the shooting of the two Israeli-embassy staffers near the Capital Jewish Museum last month, Trump took to Truth Social to extend condolences to the victims’ families and condemn the attack, writing, “These horrible D.C. killings, based obviously on antisemitism, must end, NOW! Hatred and Radicalism have no place in the USA.”
A month before that, after an arson attack at the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion on the first night of Passover, Trump’s response was delayed and muted. He made no Truth Social post, waited a week to call Governor Josh Shapiro—a Democrat angling to be one of the party’s leading Trump critics–—and dismissed the suspect as “probably just a whack job” without assigning any sort of blame. That response was not atypical for Trump, who has been slow to denounce political violence against Democrats (such as the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, an assault that Trump later turned into a punch line at his rallies) or committed in his name (the January 6 insurrection).
After the Colorado incident, he waited until the following morning to post on Truth Social and, instead of focusing on the apparent anti-Semitism behind the attack, opted to return to his favorite political hobbyhorse, immigration. The choice was revealing: Throughout his political career, Trump has cited the dangers posed by migrants to argue for closed borders and hard-line policies.
[Juliette Kayyem: The deadly virus of anti-Semitic terrorism]
A White House official and an outside political adviser told us that Trump is not concerned about being criticized for not showing sufficient sympathy for fearful Jewish Americans. He believes that he has already proved his strong support of Israel, even though cracks in his relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have grown evident in recent months.
They claim that Trump has the political winds at his back again; his poll numbers are recovering from their trade-war-driven decline and Republicans in the House of Representatives have passed a sweeping budget bill.
With Soliman’s family in custody on Tuesday evening, the White House posted on X: “Six One-Way Tickets for Mohamed’s Wife and Five Kids. Final Boarding Call Coming Soon.”
Yesterday, in Colorado, U.S. District Judge Gordon P. Gallagher blocked the Trump administration from immediately deporting Soliman’s wife, Hayam El Gamal, and their children, ordering ICE to follow standard due process. Gallagher, a Biden appointee, has scheduled a hearing for June 13. ICE records show that El Gamal and her children are being held at a family-detention center in Dilley, Texas.