Calls are mounting for the release of a Palestinian woman who has been held in immigration detention for nearly a year following her arrest at a pro-Palestine protest last year, with several elected officials weighing in after a medical emergency renewed attention to her case.
Leqaa Kordia, a 33-year-old originally from the West Bank, was arrested in April 2024 at a protest against Israel’s war in Gaza outside Columbia University. (She was not a student there.) The charges against her were dismissed the following day, but last March, nearly a year after the protest, she was taken into custody when she checked into an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office in New Jersey. She had a pending asylum application at the time, her attorney said.
Kordia has been held at the Prairieland detention facility in Texas since then, despite a judge twice ruling that she poses no threat and may be released on bond.
On 6 February, Kordia was hospitalized after suffering a seizure while in detention. Her family and attorneys said they were kept in the dark about her condition for three days and that she has been experiencing dizziness, fainting episodes and significant weight loss since she was detained.
Kordia has since been returned to the detention center. She said in a statement issued through her attorneys on Thursday that her hands and legs were chained the entire time she was at the hospital and that guards would not let her speak with her family or allow an attorney to visit her.
“They even refused to remove the chains when I went to the bathroom or took a shower,” she said. “I felt like an animal.
“ICE detention facilities are built to break people and destroy their health and hope,” she added. “I want everyone to know what happened to me because the same things are happening to other women who are locked up here.”
Kordia’s arrest took place around the time when the administration was pursuing the detention and deportation of a number of international students – among them students Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi – for their Palestine advocacy. In a blistering opinion last fall, a federal judge in Boston ruled the detention of immigrants for their speech was unconstitutional and intentionally designed to chill speech. The students have since been released but the administration is continuing to seek their deportation.
Khalil and Mahdawi were both permanent residents at the time of their arrest. Kordia’s immigration status was more precarious. She had originally entered the country on a student visa but stayed after it expired, according to the DHS. Her immigration attorney said she had a pending asylum application at the time of her arrest by ICE and that she currently had an approved family petition – a first step toward permanent residence – through her mother, a US citizen.
Since many Palestinians from the occupied territories hold no formal citizenship – making them legally stateless – they have rarely been deported from the US. But as part of its immigration crackdown, the Trump administration has stepped up efforts to deport Palestinians from the West Bank. A recent Guardian investigation found the US has flown a number of Palestinians from the West Bank to Israel on an ICE-chartered private luxury jet belonging to a friend of the president.
Kordia’s attorneys say she has been caught up in the administration’s mass deportation campaign, but that her case is a matter of chilling speech the government doesn’t like.
“This is intentional,” said Sadaf Hasan, a member of her legal team. “To show, this is what happens when you speak up and organize.”
“ICE targeted her for speaking out against genocide,” Representative Rashida Tlaib, one of a number of members of Congress who have called for her release, said on X. Representative Nellie Cou of New Jersey, where Kordia lived with her US citizen mother, pressed ICE’s acting director, Todd Lyons, about her case during an oversight hearing on Tuesday.
“Why have you failed to inform her family where she was sent and the status of her condition?” Cou asked Lyons, as an aide held up a photo of Kordia. “When will she be freed?”
The New Jersey senators Andy Kim and Cory Booker also called for Kordia’s release. New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, called her detention “cruel and unnecessary”.
In a statement to the Guardian, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security dismissed Kordia’s claims about medical neglect. “For many illegal aliens this is the best healthcare they receive in their entire lives,” the spokesperson said.
Kordia was “found to be providing financial support to individuals living in nations hostile to the US”, the spokesperson added. Kordia’s attorneys said that she tried to send money to help relatives in Gaza, where more than 150 members of her extended family were killed in Israeli airstrikes.
In an op-ed she published last month from detention, Kordia, who is a practicing Muslim, said that she had been denied access to halal food and that she was eating only packaged food from the center’s commissary.
“Ours is a daily battle for basic dignity,” she wrote of individuals held in ICE custody, while also nodding to the condition of “thousands of Palestinians languishing in Israeli prisons”.
Kordia’s cousin, Hamzah Abushaban, who visited her in detention before her seizure, told the Guardian she had become unrecognizable. “She’s extremely weak, she’s extremely sick, she’s not herself,” he said, adding that Kordia had been proud to move to the US.
“And all of this for what? For practicing her first amendment right, her freedom of speech,” Abushaban said. “The only reason why she’s locked up is because the administration didn’t like what she had to say.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
