Kathryn Brady with the Muslim Legal Fund of America called it a "miracle." With no warning, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement released her client — Egyptian imam and chaplain Ayman Soliman — on Sept. 19 and reinstated his asylum protections after keeping him locked up for 73 days and threatening to deport him to a country where he said he would face certain death.

"I had prayed for these miracles — his release from ICE custody, his immigration court proceedings dismissed, and his asylum being restored," Brady told Law360.

Miracles aside, Soliman's legal team launched a full-throttled attack on the government's claim that Soliman should be deported because of work he did for the Egyptian Islamic charitable group Al-Gam'iyya al-Shar'iyya, which U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said constituted material support for an undesignated terrorist organization because of the group's purported ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Working alongside them, Rep. Greg Landsman, D-Ohio, met with ICE officials to advocate on Soliman's behalf, telling Law360 that his office worked hand in hand with Soliman's legal team. Community members in Cincinnati, where Soliman serves as an imam at the Clifton Mosque and works as a chaplain at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, also advocated on his behalf, in public and in court filings.

On all fronts, Brady described an overt willingness to publicly call out what she deemed the government's mischaracterization of Soliman, to "correct the incorrect narrative" and ultimately secure his release.

"I feel like it was a game of chicken … and we just didn't flinch," Brady said. "We said, 'We are going to just show you every single thing we have to prove you shouldn't be doing this to him.'"

Soliman told Law360 he wasn't always so sure his case was heading in the right direction. At times, he felt despondent and lost confidence that he would win his case. During those times, he said, the community support and advocacy on his behalf brought him back to life.

That support, including hundreds of letters from strangers, helped him endure the fear of being sent home.

"I had a strong faith, and I know God can do everything. But the situation was very dark, and in some dark moments, my only support system was the letters that I was getting," Soliman said. "Reading the loving and compassionate messages and letters and people telling me, 'This is not the America that I'd like to live in. I'm so sorry my country is treating you this way.' It was just so beautiful."

Soliman fled Egypt in 2014 and filed for asylum based on past persecution for his journalism during the Arab Spring uprising. The first Trump administration granted his asylum request in 2018.

Soliman's attorneys, including counsel from the Muslim Legal Fund of America and Brennan Manna & Diamond LLC, deconstructed the government's narrative by highlighting inconsistencies and errors in the evidence presented.

Brennan Manna's Robert Ratliff painted the government's evidence as "a house of cards."

Among the errors noted by Ratliff, a former immigration judge, the federal government misdated Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's designation of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. Citizenship and Immigration Services also misrepresented academic studies that it cited to justify revoking Soliman's status and wrongly accused Soliman of having arrest warrants in Iraq for murder and terrorism, he said.

The final straw, however, came shortly before ICE abruptly released Soliman. Ratcliff said he discovered a discrepancy between the notice of termination the government provided to Soliman, and the one it gave the immigration court. The latter notice contained an additional allegation against Soliman: that he was a member of a terrorist organization.

The day Solimon was released, Ratliff had filed a motion asking for a status conference in the immigration proceedings to resolve the discrepancy. About two hours later, Ratliff said he got word that the Department of Homeland Security was going to dismiss the case, restore Soliman's asylum status and release him from detention.

"The entire strategy was to attack the government's evidence because — we knew, we believed — that Ayman had not done the things that they alleged he had done," Ratliff said in an interview.

Soliman said he couldn't take the government's allegations against him seriously, because in his view, they didn't make sense. According to Soliman, he showed his asylum officer a June 2014 ruling by Egypt's Administrative Court holding that Al-Gam'iyya al-Shar'iyya had no ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The ruling lifted a freeze on the charity's assets.

"Their allegations were not my biggest worry. My biggest worry was, they're desperately working hard to find something that can justify sending me home," Soliman said.

On top of the fear of being sent back to Egypt, Soliman said, the government's actions left him with a key takeaway.

"It just gives me the message that you will never be safe here, because if we did it once, we can do it again," he said.

DHS did not return a detailed request for comment from Law360 about why it decided to release Soliman, and whether errors the attorneys identified prompted that action.

The U.S. has not designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, but Sisi's government did in 2013 — not in 2012, as USCIS had stated in Soliman's termination notice — after ousting Egypt's first democratically elected president, the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi.

The USCIS notice cited two studies to support its contention that Al-Gam'iyya al-Shar'iyya was involved with the Muslim Brotherhood from 2011 to 2013, before Sisi's designation. USCIS leaned on one of them, a study by Steven Brooke, director of the Middle East studies program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, to conclude that the charity worked hand-in-glove with the Muslim Brotherhood during that time.

USCIS said the group transported female Muslim voters to polling stations, while the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, Morsi's Freedom and Justice Party, partnered with Al-Gam'iyya al-Shar'iyya to provide medical services — acts USCIS said made the group "openly associated" with a terror organization under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Ratliff reached out to the authors of both studies, including Brooke, who promptly responded to the attorney and agreed to submit declarations rebutting USCIS' interpretation of the evidence. Both agreed to testify at Soliman's immigration trial as well.

Brooke told Law360 he wanted to get involved because of the life-and-death stakes of asylum cases.

"The overwhelming thing I'm concerned with is that accurate information be presented to the decision makers," Brooke said in an interview. "And I felt that the way my work had been presented in those charging documents was not accurate."

Brooke said the characterization of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization isn't substantiated by the evidence, particularly since Morsi was in power in Egypt during part of the relevant timeframe and actively engaged in diplomatic relations with the U.S.

"To argue that at this moment they were a terrorist organization was kind of at odds with official U.S. government policy, but also just kind of common sense during this period," he said.

Transporting voters could have had a valid cultural explanation, such as assisting veiled Muslim women wary of public transport, Brooke said.

It really falls "short of what we would want to see in a case like this, which is that this individual was actively organizationally affiliated to this organization," Brooke said.

In addition to attacking the government's evidence in the case, Brady said the legal team drew inspiration from the success of habeas challenges brought by foreign students whom the Trump administration is trying to deport.

Those students, like Mahmoud Kahlil, were arrested and detained under Secretary of State Marco Rubio's determination that their ongoing presence in the U.S. would have a potentially adverse impact on U.S. foreign policy objectives, including combating anti-Semitism.

Khalil, and others who were detained under the same authority, won release from immigration detention with federal judges finding that the provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that Rubio invoked is likely unconstitutional for vagueness.

In Khalil's case, a federal judge found that his ongoing immigration detention was harming his free-speech rights. Brady said attorneys in those cases weren't afraid to call out the government's behavior and raise due process issues.

Brady said they took their cues from those cases, going to federal court with a habeas petition sooner rather than later and seeking other relief, like a reversal of the asylum termination.

"I think a lot of times we try to protect our clients by saying, 'Let's just not do things that are going to ruffle the feathers of the people who can give us what we want,'" Brady said. "But I think that we've turned a corner where that has to be the way to go."

In the meantime, Soliman said, he is trying to adapt to his renewed lease on life, and find ways to give back to the community that supported him and others he met while detained who have no one advocating on their behalf.

As a chaplain, Soliman said he found comfort in supporting and listening to other detainees' stories, saying he was "very happy to be able to support them." It's one factor, he said, that gave him hope and kept him going during his detention.

"I was lucky, I was one of the very rare cases that ended unexpectedly joyful. And I know there are so many people who did not get this opportunity to have their voice heard and to have a community advocating for them," Soliman said. "So I'm also trying to see what I can do without jeopardizing my life again."

Soliman is represented by Robert A. Ratliff of Brennan Manna & Diamond LLC, and by Kathryn H. Brady and Franchel Daniel of the Muslim Legal Fund of America.

The Department of Homeland Security is represented by Adam Cody Tieger, Sherry D. Soanes and William Bryan King II of the U.S. Department of Justice.

The case is Soliman v. Edlow et al., case number 1:25-cv-00510, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio.

--Editing by Karin Roberts.