She graduated from high school in 2005, attending Orange Coast College at first before transferring to The American University in Cairo in 2008.

The next day, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents searched the Ibrahims' home, explaining that a neighbor had called a tipline to report the family.

The neighbor's concerns were the fact that Ibrahim's uncle sometimes walked outside at night while speaking Arabic on phone calls, and a U-Haul truck had recently been parked outside their house.

As the only Muslim in her class, Ibrahim was also asked to give a presentation about Islam at her school despite the fact that her family was not very religious.

[10] She became involved in the Egyptian revolution of 2011[2][11] as an organizer,[7][12] additionally engaging in citizen journalism by using social media including Twitter while attending protests[13][8] "to spread accurate information and paint a picture at the ground".

[16] In October 2011, Ibrahim reported that she had been briefly arrested while filming a strike action by public transport workers in Cairo, and was released after agreeing to delete her footage.

[21] On The Daily Show, Ibrahim told Jon Stewart that she initially joined the protests because of a class she took at the American University in Cairo called "Social Mobilization under Authoritarian Regimes.

"[24] On February 14, 2011, she appeared on an Al Jazeera English talk show alongside Alaa Abd El-Fattah and Mohamad Waked to discuss the events in Egypt after the fall of Hosni Mubarak.

[29] After the 2013 coup, Ibrahim's husband went into exile because he wanted to remain a journalist, while she founded a shoe manufacturing company in Cairo.

[27] A September 2021 article in The National identified Ibrahim as the co-owner of Cairo shoe manufacturing company Bulga, founded in 2016, along with artisan Mona Sorour.

The shoes are designed through collaboration with indigenous groups in various regions of Egypt and manufactured in multiple workshops across the country, using exclusively Egyptian materials and labor; Ibrahim cited the decline of traditional craftsmanship resulting from the increase in mass-produced items as a major factor in the creation of Bulga.