A lawyer representing the family of the Boulder, Colo., firebomber in their deportation case has a long history of defending anti-Israel radicals, including a Yale Law School scholar who moonlit as a member of a U.S.-sanctioned terrorist fundraising organization and a Brown University faculty member who attended slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral.
After Mohammed Soliman threw molotov cocktails at a group supporting Israeli hostages, the Trump administration moved to deport the Egyptian national’s wife, Hayam El Gamal, and five children, who overstayed their visas. Eric Lee was one of the four lawyers who came to their defense, arguing that their removal was reminiscent of Nazi Germany. A judge ruled last week that deportation proceedings against the family could continue and that they could remain detained.
For Lee, it’s the latest in a long line of controversial cases that has seen the attorney take on a who’s who of radical activists.
Perhaps his most well-known client is Helyeh Doutaghi, a research scholar at Yale Law School who was put on leave for moonlighting as a member of Samidoun. The U.S. government sanctioned that organization in October in an announcement that described it as a “sham charity” and a “front organization” for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a foreign-designated terrorist organization.
Samidoun’s website indicates that Doutaghi delivered a speech in Iran for a Samidoun-sponsored screening of a film honoring Lebanese terrorist Georges Abdallah. She also traveled with a Samidoun group on a 2023 “fact-finding mission” to Venezuela to observe the impact of “U.S. sanctions and coercive economic measures,” and was scheduled to speak on an October panel alongside Khaled Barakat—whom the United States has also sanctioned in his capacity as a PFLP leader—though that was postponed indefinitely.
Still, during an interview on The Hill, Lee repeatedly refused to answer whether Doutaghi was a member of Samidoun, and instead compared the questioning to McCarthyism.
“‘Have you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?’ These are the types of questions that my client isn’t obligated to respond to,” he said. “We do not feel as a matter of principle that it’s appropriate to put her in the position where she suddenly has to justify potential meetings she’s attended.”
In addition to Doutaghi, Lee defended Rasha Alawieh, an assistant professor of medicine at Brown University who was deported after authorities found evidence she attended Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral in Lebanon. He’s also represented well-known student radicals on elite college campuses.
One of them, Prahlad Iyengar, was suspended from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after the university accused him of supporting terrorism in an October article, “On Pacifism,” which featured PFLP flyers, argued violence is necessary in the anti-Israel movement to overcome “colonial oppression,” and called peaceful protest a “charade.”
“We have a duty to escalate for Palestine, and as I hope I’ve argued, the traditional pacifist strategies aren’t working because they are ‘designed into’ the system we fight against,” Iyengar wrote.
Another Lee client was Momodou Taal, the Cornell University student who had his visa revoked in March after calling for the destruction of the United States and celebrating Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks. Taal sued the Trump administration over its executive order calling to expel pro-Hamas visa holders. Lee represented Taal in both the suit and the deportation proceedings.
In the suit, Lee, on Taal’s behalf, argued that the order forced him to withdraw from “public engagement” and thus “deprived” his friends “of their rights to listen” to his “ideas and suggestions.” Such suggestions include a call for campus protesters to take their “cue from the armed resistance in Palestine.”
But Lee’s argument became moot after a federal court ruled against the pair and rejected Taal’s requests for a protection order. Taal, a Gambian and British dual national, opted to self-deport and dropped the suit.
Lee first took on Taal as a client months earlier when Cornell suspended the student over his involvement in a September anti-Israel protest that saw keffiyeh-clad agitators violently push past police to disrupt a career fair. Lee defended 13 other students suspended for the incident, as well.
Lee has been engaged in other anti-Israel activities besides representing radical clients. During a May 31 speech before the Socialist Equality Party in London, Lee claimed that “nobody, no reasonable person, can have any idea of what type of speech is antisemitic.”
He also shared X posts from Unity of Fields, a self-described “militant front against the US-NATO-zionist axis of imperialism” that has vowed to bring violence to America. The posts boasted about detainees breaking out of an ICE detention center and called for “MANY Al-AQSA FLOODS!”—referring to Hamas’s name for the terror group’s Oct. 7 attack.
Hearing reports of an uprising in the Delaney Hall ICE facility in Newark, NJ. We will post updates and verified information in this thread as we find out more.
CHINGA LA MIGRA! Every prisoner will rise! Flood the gates! 1…2…MANY AL-AQSA FLOODS!
— Unity of Fields (@unityoffields) June 13, 2025
Weeks later, Lee pointed out that the Declaration of Independence “asserts a right to revolution!”
Lee has long defended immigrants, even winning an award for his involvement in a 2024 Supreme Court case that he lost. He’s also been highly critical of both parties on immigration, accusing them of abandoning “their responsibility of upholding democratic rights.” During the June 2024 presidential debate, Lee accused then-president Joe Biden of failing to push back against President Donald Trump “using Hitler’s talking points on immigration.” A month before the November election, he said the Biden-Harris administration was pandering to Trump by considering changes that would make it harder to lift asylum restrictions.
Since Trump’s election, Lee has repeatedly called for Americans to “forcefully” rise up against the president and his immigration policies, particularly in Los Angeles.
“[W]e need to sober up and realize that the only way to protect immigrants and their families is to mobilize the population,” he wrote in a December op-ed in Slate while arguing that sanctuary city policies wouldn’t be sufficient to stop the federal government’s deportation plans. “Civil society must respond forcefully to defend our neighbors, friends, and democracy itself the moment that they are threatened. Lawyers, academics, teachers, labor, all must coordinate not only to fight Trump in the courts but to mobilize the schools and workplaces and the population in defense of immigrants and democratic rights.”
Lee did not return a request for comment.
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