A mother and her five children are hoping a federal judge releases them from immigration detention after being locked up for almost a year, an extraordinary length of time in custody for children.

They are the family of Mohamed Soliman, an Egyptian national accused of assembling Molotov cocktails last year and firebombing a group in Boulder, Colo., gathered to show support for Israeli hostages.

A woman died and 12 others were injured in what the U.S. government called a terrorist attack.

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Soliman was immediately arrested and the Department of Homeland Security also took his wife and children, who had been living in Colorado Springs, into custody. They have now filed another request in federal court to be released on bond.

Hayam El Gamal and her children are Egyptian citizens who DHS says are in the country illegally after overstaying a tourist visa in 2023. The family filed an asylum claim before their visa expired, according to their attorney.

Scripps News obtained letters the children have written to Congress, detailing their 10-month ordeal held at the Dilley immigration detention center in Texas.

The youngest of the children are 5-year-old twins, and their letters are written in colored pencil.

“When we will we go home?” One of the children wrote on a drawing of the family standing under birds and clouds in the sky.

A picture by the other 5-year-old says, “I want to go home ... I want to go to school ... I miss my bear.”

The oldest child, 18-year-old Habiba Soliman, graduated from high school weeks before her arrest.

“I would have never expected to go from a girl who was doing everything to achieve her dream to a girl that had her life destroyed just because of her father,” she writes in a letter.

She spoke to Scripps News on the phone from inside Dilley, where she has been separated from the rest of her family.

“It is too much,” she said. “I feel like I'm living in a nightmare and it just can't be true.”

A letter from her 9-year-old sister says, “Every day we see people leave. But us, no. I want to get out and eat pizza and bananas.”

Her 16-year-old brother penned his own letter.

“This prolonged detention has and continues to destroy our lives,” he said, sharing details about delayed treatment for appendicitis.

“I cried and begged (a nurse) to help me ... I then fell to my hands and knees and threw up ... It was only then that I was taken seriously and transferred to a nearby ER.”

The family’s attorney said one of the five-year-olds has 13 untreated cavities.

“This family is being systematically denied medical attention,” Eric Lee said. “There's no question that this family has been specifically targeted. The idea that a five- year-old can be detained because they're suspected of assisting in a terrorist attack is absurd.”

Dilley is owned and operated by the CoreCivic company under contract with the U.S. government. DHS and CoreCivic dispute all claims about mistreatment and lack of or delayed care at the detention center.

In a statement, DHS says the El Gamals are in custody while the government investigates “to what extent the family knew about this heinous attack” in Colorado.

However, that contradicts what court records reviewed by Scripps News show. An FBI agent and a federal judge both found the family had no involvement or awareness of the plot.

"We, unfortunately, happen to be the family of somebody who committed a criminal act,” Habiba Soliman said. “I know what he did is awful. We didn't know anything. Our whole life (was) destroyed in seconds.”

The family hopes to return to Colorado Springs. Voluntarily going to Egypt is not an option, Lee said.

"The U.S. government has called them terrorists before the eyes of the world,” Lee said. “We know that when they go back to Egypt, they're on a list of people who are going to be arrested. They're going to get locked up in a dungeon in Egypt.”

The federal limit on children in U.S. detention is generally 20 days. The El Gamal children have been locked up at Dilley for more than 300 days.

“This place broke something in us,” Habiba Soliman wrote in her letter, “something that I don’t know if we will ever be able to fix.”