A Federal Judge Just Ordered the Government to Fly a Phoenix Man Home From Equatorial Guinea

PHOENIX — A federal judge has ordered the U.S. government to do something the government insisted it couldn't do: bring Ahmed Soliman home. Soliman, a 31-year-old Phoenix man, was deported to Equatorial Guinea in April without notice and without any chance to object. A federal judge in Arizona ruled Tuesday that the deportation violated U.S. law and Soliman's constitutional right to due process — and that the government must now pay to get him back.

U.S. District Judge John C. Hinderaker ordered the Department of Homeland Security to take "all reasonable steps within their control," according to the ruling, to facilitate Soliman's release from custody in Equatorial Guinea, including issuing travel documentation and arranging transportation to a U.S. port of entry — at DHS's expense. The judge also ordered the agency to file a status report every three days detailing Soliman's location, his physical condition, and what the government has done to secure his return.

What happened to Soliman after his deportation is not in dispute. According to the Arizona Republic, DHS's own attorneys did not contest the account that ICE deported him without a fear screening — the process that lets immigrants express fear of persecution or torture in the country they're being sent to — or that he has suffered abuse in Equatorial Guinea. The judge's order said, citing news reports and lawyers' affidavits: "The unrebutted record shows that, since his removal, (Soliman) has been confined under armed guard, assaulted, held at gunpoint, and, most recently, arrested, hooded, beaten, and held incommunicado, reportedly without food or water."

When his legal team read the order, "We all frankly broke into tears of relief, and hope," said Dana Camilleri, a senior attorney at Tucson-based Green Evans-Schroeder, the firm that filed a civil complaint on Soliman's behalf on September 15.

The timeline the judge laid out is grim. Soliman was deported in April, held for months at a decommissioned hotel — Hotel Bamy — where he and dozens of other U.S. deportees were confined under armed guard. Reuters reported in September that Soliman said he'd been roughed up by Equatorial Guinean police; Reuters video showed officers pulling firearms on migrants, including Soliman. Days after that report, he was arrested at the hotel and has been held incommunicado at a gendarmerie station since September 11.

Lawyers say he was targeted for that arrest because he refused to stop talking about what was happening to the deportees. He told the Arizona Daily Star he spoke out because he wanted Americans to know what was being done in their government's name. "He had the courage to speak out when doing so placed him at extraordinary personal risk," his attorney Jesse Evans-Schroeder said in a statement.

Soliman's case has a strange, infuriating symmetry with the reason he was supposed to be protected in the first place. Born in Egypt, he was brought to the United States at age 4 when his family fled on a religious visa. He grew up in Phoenix, later obtained lawful permanent residency — and then lost it. In 2021, he caused a car crash while under the influence of fentanyl. He was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison in 2023, and his immigration status collapsed along with it.

After finishing his sentence, he was transferred to ICE custody. But the government couldn't simply send him back to Egypt: in October 2025, an immigration judge granted him protection under the U.N. Convention Against Torture, finding that as a gay man — and given his family's political activity in Egypt — he would face torture or death if returned there. That protection remains in effect. So ICE went looking for a third country instead.

That's how he ended up in Equatorial Guinea, a country where, as the Republic notes, homosexuality is de facto criminalized — a place where he says he would have made the same torture argument had anyone ever given him a credible-fear interview before his removal. Nobody did. According to the order, ICE deported him "without notice or the opportunity to object" — in the Republic's words, he was forcibly carried onto the plane.

The vehicle for all of this was a secretive agreement: the Republic reports the U.S. State Department paid Equatorial Guinea $7.5 million to receive third-country deportees. DHS has claimed that fear screenings aren't necessary when a receiving country gives "diplomatic assurances" that deportees will be safe. Multiple judges have rejected that argument, most recently in the First Circuit in September, in a case known as DVD vs. DHS. The government has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which stayed the ruling; the justices are expected to hear the case in December.

Hinderaker wasn't buying the government's other defense either. DHS argued that Soliman is in the custody of Equatorial Guinea, not the United States, and that a court order would "intrude on the Executive's conduct of foreign affairs." Hinderaker said, in essence: fine, but planes, travel documents and admission to the United States are all within DHS's control.

And in an echo of the most notorious wrongful-deportation case of the year — Kilmar Abrego Garcia, deported to El Salvador in violation of an immigration judge's order — Hinderaker also barred DHS from simply shipping Soliman off to a different third country next. Under the order, the government cannot remove him to another third country without first giving him a "meaningful opportunity" to raise a fear claim before a neutral judge.

DHS still has 30 days to appeal. Notably, the agency declined to proceed with oral arguments in the case — arguments had been scheduled for Wednesday — and the judge issued his final order instead. "I think the decision not to have oral arguments today was because they knew they'd lost in this phase," Camilleri told the Republic.

The bigger picture, beyond one man in one gendarmerie station: Human Rights Watch said in a report published Thursday that 536 people were deported to African countries that are "neither their country of citizenship nor habitual residence" between January 2025 and August 2026. Reuters has documented 40 cases of migrants granted U.S. legal protection after being persecuted for their LGBT status who were then deported to third countries in Africa that criminalize same-sex relations or are considered hostile to LGBT people. More than 20 deportees are still being held at Hotel Bamy in Equatorial Guinea, their phones confiscated, incommunicado since early September. Attorneys hope Soliman's win points a way home for them too. "It is a glimmer of hope, in a very long dark tunnel," said Kate O'Donnell, another attorney on his team.

For a Phoenix man the federal government carried onto a plane in April, the question now is how long "bring him home" takes. His story is a reminder of how accountability works — and doesn't — when immigration enforcement meets the justice system, much like the records fight playing out in Phoenix's own police department over who gets to see what the government did. Meanwhile, violence on the west side of the Valley continues to make headlines of its own, including the double shooting at a west Phoenix Ethiopian restaurant earlier this year.