Attorney Eric Lee grabbed national media attention after a video he posted went viral, showing a spontaneous protest inside the South Texas Residential Center in Dilley.
In the clip, he described hundreds of detainees flooding the courtyard of the privately run ICE facility south of San Antonio, where Lee has clients inside. The prisoners were chanting “libertad” and “let us out,” spiritually joining in the Minneapolis anti-ICE strike the day before.
Lee represents a family of six from Colorado, who have been detained inside Dilley for nine months. The El Gamal family was detained following a violent antisemitic attack by their estranged father, Mohamed Soliman, in Boulder, Colorado, on June 1. The family maintains that they knew nothing of the man’s plans to attack a Jewish group with a makeshift flamethrower and Molotov cocktails, injuring eight.
Nonetheless, the mother, two 5-year-old twins, a 9-year-old girl, a 16-year old boy and an 18-year-old girl remain locked up at the facility.
In an interview with the Current, Lee said their ongoing detention reveals a rot within the system, which goes much deeper than Trump. And rather than waiting for democrats to save us, Lee asserts, the people must save themselves.
Do you believe your clients are being detained for an extended amount of time as political retribution?
This is a punishment not for anything that the family did but for something that somebody else did. And that is how things work in police states. And the Nazis had a whole sort of legal concept for it called sippenhaft [or kin liability], which gave the state the authority to detain relatives of individuals who commit crimes. That’s what the Trump administration has done to this family. There were White House tweets from the Groiper social media managers, and Kristi Noem made a statement basically insinuating that they were terrorists too: 5-year-old terrorists, 16-year-old terrorists, everybody’s a terrorist. And so they’ve been detained as a result of that for 9 months.
And how is that possible with the Flores settlement, which limits detention of children to 20 days maximum?
Well, the Flores settlement is 40 years old. It’s inadequate to protect these people. And the government basically claims it doesn’t exist. So, it gives families a choice of either basically giving up your children and staying in detention and letting them be free or remaining together. It’s a Sophie’s choice of sorts. I mean, these 5-year-olds are not going to get released without their mom. That’s what they have decided. I can’t imagine the federal government making me as a 5-year-old, or me as a single mother of five, make that choice, and the families involved will never recover from the psychological damage, let alone the physical damage that being in these facilities causes.
You told media outlet Democracy Now that if they get deported, they face potential death. Why is that?
Well, there are some details of the asylum case that require privacy, but the White House has made them international news. They cooperated with federal authorities in the aftermath of the husband’s arrest, and so they’re going to be perceived as collaborators with the U.S. government. The husband was also a supporter of [former president of Egypt] Mohamed Morsi, whose Muslim Brotherhood was slaughtered by the El-Sisi government. They’re just very, very vulnerable. They could have gone back to Egypt. The fact that they are enduring so much hardship, so much brutal treatment in Dilley gives you a sense of how genuinely fearful they are of being returned to Egypt. And an immigration judge hasn’t even looked at the merits of their asylum case yet. That’s the other infuriating part of this. They haven’t even had the chance to go into court and explain why they’re afraid of going home.
And the teenage daughter Habiba Solimani is separated from the rest of the family. Tell me more about her situation.
The family called and said that Habiba had been moved. She turned 18 four days after the family was detained in 2025. The government kept her with her family for this whole period. And then days after she did an interview with CBS News, she’s suddenly separated from them because she’s an 18-year-old, something which she had been for 8 months with their knowledge. So, the timing certainly leads us to the conclusion that that was retribution through speaking out. Internet was cut a couple of days after Renee Goode was murdered. I mean, this is the dangerous thing too. This is part of a separation from society that historically becomes very dangerous under conditions of mass detention. When they lose access to the news, when they lose access to information, it is a slippery slope to losing access to legal counsel, to losing access to family correspondence. And then suddenly nobody knows what is going on in these places and they have no way to communicate in any way. That’s when even worse things start happening as we’re seeing in places like [El Paso immigrant detention camp] East Montana.
On Democracy Now, you had particularly pointed criticism of presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. And you said that it’s imperative that the movement stay 100 miles away from the Democratic Party. Can you explain that?
Well, first, because history shows that that’s the graveyard of all popular movements, the Democratic Party today, especially its “left” members — people like Bernie Sanders and Ocasio Cortez — they exist to channel growing social opposition back into the political establishment. They’re a catchment area, a sort of lightning rod that takes this powerful movement and tries to disarm it and prevent it from developing in the direction that’s really required — and that’s a national general strike. Keep in mind, these are people that voted to prohibit a railroad strike in 2023. These are out-and-out supporters of American imperialism. They’re totally complicit in the bipartisan anti-immigration framework. Bernie Sanders says that open borders are a Koch brothers idea. You know, they’re all standing by silently when Biden and Obama are deporting people and separating families.
I want to relate that statement to the press conference where I met you, because some of the activists afterwards told me that they felt like props. Of course, operating in silos is probably not the answer either. So, what I want to know is what do you see as the path forward for the movement so you don’t totally shun elected officials to a detrimental degree, but also remain rightfully be wary of them? How do you think they can navigate that?
Well, look, the Democratic Party doesn’t do anything out of the kindness of its heart. History shows that it’s only when this party is confronted with the specter of an actual revolutionary movement that it feels compelled to do something. For instance, through the New Deal period, the Civil Rights movement in the ’60s, the codification of certain social programs — Medicare, Medicaid, etc. Historically, the Democratic Party is the party of Chinese exclusion. And the Republicans of course, were involved in this too. Democrats were the party that carried out violent pogroms against the Chinese population in Tacoma, Washington; Eureka, California; Honolulu; Seattle. This is the party of the Palmer Raids against noncitizens involved in socialist and left-wing political work. This is the party that supported the National Origins Act, I mean the party of Alien Registration Act, which led to mass deportations and the internment of the Japanese. And this is the party that passed all the restrictive anti-immigration measures in the ’90s that militarized the southern border, that built up ICE and CBP. Bernie Sanders was there in Congress this whole time. He voted for the IRA in 1996. The Obama administration comes in after the big demonstrations in 2006, promising hope and change and all of that garbage that a lot of people believed for a second. And then he carries out millions and millions of deportations, massive expansion of the powers of ICE, brings the facilities for child detention into being. But that’s the party, whatever the individual Congress members might say, that’s historic. It’s an imperialist party, it’s a capitalist party, it stinks to high hell and it doesn’t do anything to fight Trump anyway. Seven of the Senate Democrats voted for Kristi Noem, alright? They all voted for Marco Rubio, who’s deporting Mahmoud Khalil and Momodou Taal and Rümeysa Öztürk. I mean, how much more exposed does this party have to be? And I think that the question then is what’s the other social force? And the answer to that is it’s the working class.
Are you going so far as to say don’t vote as harm reduction? Or are you saying to vote, but realize that Democrats are not going to save you?
I’m a member of the Socialist Equality Party. It publishes the World Socialist website. It’s a Trotskyist international organization. It’s not just a question of voting. It’s about what you’re doing politically. And the answer to that should be to develop a network of committees in every workplace, in every neighborhood to mobilize the power of the working class in defense of basic democratic rights and against the transformation of this country into a police-state dictatorship, which is what Trump is trying to do and which the Democrats are letting him do. And the answer is from below. This movement has to be rooted in the neighborhoods. It has to be rooted in factories, in big warehouses, in the working class. It’s the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, OK? It’s easy to criticize the Founding Fathers. We don’t know what they would think about trans rights. But they risked their necks for revolution against basically the same things that the Trump administration is doing to the country today. Occupying the cities, violating the Fourth Amendment rights, breaking into people’s homes, even quartering troops in hotels across the country. I mean, they said there’s a right of revolution when the government becomes violative of democratic rights. It’s the right of the people to alter or abolish it. And this is all happening 250 years ago. I think those are very important democratic, revolutionary traditions that people have to tap into and awaken from the standpoint of fighting for the building of a revolutionary movement against what’s happening in this country, against capitalism. You can’t understand where this fascist movement is coming from without understanding the unprecedented levels of social inequality in this country, the fact that a handful of billionaires control the majority of the wealth, the fact that both parties are totally compromised and bought by this. And that Trump and his so-called movement have even developed as itself a product of this whole degeneration of the American political system under the weight of immense social inequality. But that’s why we have to tap into the economic needs of workers of all national origins, races, religions, et cetera. And on the basis of such an appeal, we can build a movement that will change a lot of minds about immigration and will sweep away all the garbage from the far right.
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