"WELCOME HOME, AYA! #GodBlessTheUSA", tweeted President Trump along with a video that features a montage of him and Aya at the White House. Egyptian authorities arrested Hijazi, her husband and six others in May 2014 on charges of abusing children in her care and engaging in human trafficking, kidnapping, sexual exploitation and torture.
Ms Hijazi, a U.S. citizen with dual nationality, and her Egyptian husband, Mohamed Hassanein, set up the Belady Foundation in 2013 to aid street children. On Thursday night, Hijazi arrived in Washington, D.C., after the Trump administration successfully secured her released.
The administration vowed the president was indeed addressing those issues behind closed doors. That doesn't seem like a very high price, but if Sissi was that much of a friend, one has to wonder why it took this long to get Hijazi out of prison in the first place.
Trump and his aides had engaged in behind-the-scenes diplomatic efforts to gain her freedom after attempts by the previous Obama administration failed.
Hijazi was accompanied by her brother, Basel as she met Trump in the Oval Office.
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Egypt has released an Egyptian American woman who was imprisoned in Cairo for several years after Donald Trump struck a deal with the Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi.
President Donald Trump meets with Aya Hijazi, an Egyptian-American aid worker, in the Oval office of the White House in Washington, Friday, April 21, 2017.
"At the end of the day we're just pleased that she's back home ... and that the president and the team successfully worked to bring her back home", White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Friday.
Hijazi is a graduate of George Mason University and grew up in northern Virginia.
"The case of Aya Hijazi and her co-defendants has been nothing less than a travesty of justice", Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director for Human Rights Watch said in a March report. The entire case was seen as an example of human rights abuses under the brutal rule of Sisi.
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