A historically high number of immigrants are being held in detention in the U.S. today: nearly 60,000 people, according to the latest ICE data. Buried in those statistics is another alarming pattern: the number of detainees who have been sitting in ICE custody for more than a year has skyrocketed in recent months, from 998 detainees in October of 2025, to around 2,145 currently. Some of them are children as young as five years old.
NPR spoke to one family who is rapidly approaching the one-year mark in ICE detention: a mother and her children, including 5-year-old twins and a 9-year-old girl.
The El Gamal family's story begins on June 1, 2025, when their father, Mohamed Soliman, allegedly hurled molotov cocktails into a crowd in Boulder, Colorado that had gathered for a walk and vigil for Israeli hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza. One protester died of her injuries. Dozens of others were injured, several seriously.
Soliman's daughter, 17-year-old Habiba El Gamal, says when she saw the news she was horrified to learn the alleged perpetrator was her father, an Egyptian national. El Gamal was arrested for the antisemitic attack. He's facing more than 100 criminal state charges including first-degree murder, and more than two dozen counts of attempted first-degree murder as well as 12 federal hate crime counts.
"I'm completely broken now," Habiba El Gamal, who is now 18, told NPR on a staticky phone line from ICE detention in Texas. Like the rest of the family, she's estranged from her father and no longer uses his last name."I have no purpose in my life." She's been in detention for 323 days.
Shortly after her father was jailed, the entire family was arrested by ICE for overstaying their tourist visas in 2023. The family has an asylum request in progress. The government wanted to investigate if they had any knowledge of the firebombing attack before it happened.
Habiba says they had no idea; her father mostly lived outside the house. "I would have even called the authorities and told them about what he was going to do." At a 2024 federal court hearing in Colorado, an FBI agent testified that the family had no knowledge of the attack. An immigration judge ordered the family released. But the government appealed - and won.
Fast forward to April 2026: this week, once again, a U.S. magistrate judge recommended the mother and her five children be released. Judge Elizabeth "Betsy" Chestney reviewed what's known as a habeas corpus petition, and recommended that the family be released "under conditions sufficient to ensure their participation at future removal proceedings."
But the family still has not been freed. DHS says the government continues to investigate if Soliman's relatives knew about the attack before it occurred. "Mohammed Soliman is a terrorist responsible for an anti-Semitic firebombing in Boulder. The judge wants to release this terrorist's family onto American streets," DHS Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said in a statement emailed to NPR. "Under President Trump, DHS will continue to fight for the removal of those who have no right to be in our country."
"This family needs to be released," says the family's lawyer Eric Lee. "It is a basic democratic principle that the federal government cannot throw you in jail for something a relative did." Lee says this is a clear case of the government targeting the family for the alleged crimes of the father. "Every American knows a relative who has committed a crime. What would this society look like if the White House could detain people for months and months and months, based not on anything that they did, but based on their relatives' actions?"
The El Gamal family is among the growing number of people who have been in ICE detention for unusually long periods of time. In the last six months, the number of people who have been in ICE detention for more than a year has nearly doubled, to over 2,100 people.
Legal experts say there are many reasons immigrants are being detained for ever longer periods of time, including the Trump administration's default policy to detain as well as a dysfunctional, overwhelmed immigration court system."The court cases themselves are taking much longer, because there are far more people in the system," explains Rebekah Wolf, a staff attorney with the advocacy group American Immigration Council. She says the immigration court system has been effectively purged by the Trump administration. More than 100 immigration judges have been dismissed, and replaced by Trump appointees. Immigrants are increasingly losing their cases, only to find that "the government can't deport them, leaving people in limbo." Wolf herself has clients in this situation, several of whom are from countries that don't accept deportees. And, she says, getting third countries to accept deportees and coordinating the operation isn't that easy.
This isn't legal. According to a decades-old federal settlement, children can't be detained for more than 20 days. But data from the non-profit newsroom The Marshall Project shows, since the start of Trump's second term, more than 1,600 children have been detained for longer than that.
When it comes to adults, the Supreme Court ruled that after 180 days the government has to show that further detention is warranted.
Norah Ahmed with the ACLU of Louisiana has several clients who have been in ICE detention for more than a year. She believes it's partly a strategy to get people to self-deport. "The administration understands that if you are in detention for about three months, you start to lose it. You start to actually wonder: should I just voluntarily deport myself now that I see other people who have been here for so long?"
The family says enduring detention is better than being sent back to Egypt, where they fear they'll be labeled as terrorists and potentially detained. Still, they say conditions in detention at the Dilley Processing Center in Texas in the U.S. are horrible. Habiba El-Gamal says the 5-year-old twins regularly have night terrors and wake up screaming. Her own dream of going to college is shattered. "I now feel that I have no purpose in my life. My friends, my dreams, my life… it's very hard to continue," she says.
And she says her mother's health has deteriorated: she has a lump on her chest and fluid around her heart. Doctors hired by the family attorney have testified that she urgently needs medical treatment.
A hearing is scheduled for Thursday in federal court in San Antonio where a judge plans to consider Chestney's recommendation to release the family with conditions. The government is widely expected to again object to their release.
It will be day 324 of the El Gamal family's detention.
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