Aya Hijazi, founder of a nongovernmental organization that looks after street children, waits inside a holding cell in Cairo on March 23. She was taken into custody in 2014 and released this month. (Mohamed Abd El Ghany/Reuters)

In President Trump’s first weeks of office, after he signed an executive order on what has been called a “Muslim ban,” he said he would prioritize the protection of persecuted Christians. But his first big international rescue of an American citizen was a Muslim woman.

Aya Hijazi, a 30-year-old U.S.-Egyptian dual citizen, was released last week after spending nearly three years in an Egyptian prison. That Trump helped make it happen has surprised some Muslims after the president lauded the Egyptian leader who imprisoned her, and tried unsuccessfully to implement on a ban some Muslim countries that he had proposed on the campaign trail.

Hijazi, who grew up in Falls Church, Va., and graduated from George Mason University, started a foundation aiming to shelter and rehabilitate street children in Egypt. She and others from her foundation were taken into custody in 2014 and imprisoned on child abuse and trafficking charges that human rights workers and U.S. officials widely dismissed as false.

Hijazi was acquitted last week after backroom negotiations between the Trump administration and representatives of the Egyptian government.

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