Who Cares About Habiba Soliman?

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, June 04, 2025

 

Placing its finger, as per usual, on the crucial part of the story, USA Today informs us that the daughter of the illegal immigrant who set a host of peacefully marching Jews on fire in Boulder, Colo., this past weekend has experienced something of a shift in her immediate plans. “Habiba Soliman,” the paper relates, “moved to the U.S. hoping to study medicine,” but now “she faces deportation.”

 

Let me put this as delicately as I can: Who the heck cares?

 

As a proud immigrant myself, I comprehend well the case for some movement between nations. But, here, I cannot conceive of a single thing that has been lost by the Trump administration’s decision to expatriate the Solimans in bulk. USA Today proposes that Habiba Soliman “moved to the U.S.” This, though, is a deceitful euphemism for “was an illegal immigrant.” By all accounts, the Soliman family initially entered the United States legally. But it did so on a six-month-long tourist visa — a B-class document — that was, by definition, temporary. One does not — as a matter of fact, one cannot — “move to the U.S.” on a tourist visa. That is not an available option under its terms. Intrinsic to the granting of a B-visa is the promise that its recipient does not intend to stay, or study, or work, and that he will leave when its term is complete. The Soliman family — including Habiba — did not fulfill their side of the bargain. That, subsequently, one person within the party expressed an interest in a caring profession is entirely irrelevant. We have rules in this country, and the Solimans broke those rules. Upon discovery, the only correct attitude that the American government can take is, “Get out.”

 

USA Today’s story notes that one of the biggest obstacles to the success of the Solimans’ ruse was that the father, Mohamed Soliman, “was charged with a hate crime in an attack aimed at peaceful Jewish demonstration.” Which . . . ought to count for something, one would have thought? Personally, I am of the view that the mere discovery that a family is here illegally ought to precipitate a swift and permanent deportation. But if, in addition, one discovers that a member of that family has been puttering around committing jihad, the only additional question to answer is whether that deportation ought to be carried out via a circus cannon. In a video, made prior to his act of terrorism, Mohamed Soliman confessed that “jihad” was more “beloved” to him than were his mother, his wife, and his children. Well, thanks for the heads up, Mohamed. On balance, we’re going to count that one against y’all.

 

It is, of course, true that if the Solimans were an American family, the rules would be different. In that case, the federal government would be unable to deport any of them, and, quite rightly, it would be forbidden from punishing the wife and the children for the sins of the father. But the Solimans are not an American family. The Solimans are a unit of illegal immigrants, and, because they are a unit of illegal immigrants, it is wholly reasonable for the authorities to determine that their being here is against the national interest. Given the scale of the challenge, it is probably impossible to design a tourist-visa application process that will filter out everyone with a latent desire to commit jihad. Nevertheless, it seems obvious that, if we had known about Mohamed Soliman’s penchant for launching flames at American Jews, neither he nor his family would have been allowed to cross the border. It is a privilege for foreigners to come to America, and, had an agent with all the facts been privy to a file that indicated that the father was a jihadist, he would have been firmly within his rights to blacklist the entire group. As a matter of simple prudence, there would have been no plausible upside to counterbalance the risk of allowing the Solimans in.

 

Alas, when the visa was granted, we were ignorant. But we are not now, and, knowing what we know, the same judgment ought to obtain post hoc. We do not lack for tourists in the United States. There is no legal obstacle to our deporting visa overstayers. And, while we may indeed be approaching a shortage of qualified doctors, we are not yet at the point at which we need to recruit criminal aliens whose relatives enjoy committing antisemitic violence. Really, this is not a complicated one. One is either in compliance or one is not, and, even before we reach the pressing matter of the paterfamilias’s proclivity for domestic terrorism, the Solimans are not. They must go.

 

At some point in the future, the U.S. Congress will need to rewrite our dysfunctional immigration laws. When it does, we will no doubt be treated to a panoply of different ideas, premised on a wide range of competing moral, economic, and political visions. Some of these ideas will be useful, and others will not, but one sincerely hopes that none of them will be connected in even the most tangential way to the stupid and mawkish implication that we ought to feel guilty about ejecting figures such as Habiba Soliman, because, in between breaking her promises, she had some hazy dreams about wearing a stethoscope.