{"id":29344,"date":"2026-02-16T04:11:36","date_gmt":"2026-02-16T04:11:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/?p=29344"},"modified":"2026-02-16T04:11:39","modified_gmt":"2026-02-16T04:11:39","slug":"calls-mount-for-release-of-palestinian-protester-held-by-ice-for-nearly-a-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/?p=29344","title":{"rendered":"Calls mount for release of Palestinian protester held by ICE for nearly a year"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Leqaa Kordia was taken into custody last March, nearly a year after being arrested at a protest at Columbia<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>, with several elected officials weighing in after a medical emergency renewed attention to her case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leqaa Kordia, a 33-year-old originally from the West Bank, was arrested in April 2024 at a protest against Israel\u2019s war in Gaza outside\u00a0Columbia University<\/a>. (She was not a student there.) The charges against her were dismissed the following day. Still, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey even refused to remove the chains when I went to the bathroom or took a shower,\u201d she said. \u201cI felt like an animal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cICE detention facilities are built to break people and destroy their health and hope,\u201d she added. \u201cI want everyone to know what happened to me because the same things are happening to other women who are locked up here.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kordia\u2019s arrest took place around the time when the administration was pursuing the detention and deportation of a number of international students \u2013 among them, students\u00a0Mahmoud Khalil<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Mohsen Mahdawi<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 for their Palestine advocacy. In a blistering opinion last fall, a federal judge in Boston ruled the detention of immigrants for their speech was\u00a0unconstitutional<\/a>\u00a0and intentionally designed to chill speech. The students have since been released but the administration is continuing to seek their deportation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Khalil and Mahdawi were both permanent residents at the time of their arrest. Kordia\u2019s 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 has an approved family petition \u2013 a first step toward permanent residence \u2013 through her mother, a US citizen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since many Palestinians from the occupied territories hold no formal citizenship \u2013 making them legally stateless \u2013 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<\/a> on an ICE-chartered private luxury jet belonging to a friend of the president.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kordia\u2019s attorneys say she has been caught up in the administration\u2019s mass deportation campaign, but that her case is a matter of chilling speech the government doesn\u2019t like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis is intentional,\u201d said Sadaf Hasan, a member of her legal team. \u201cTo show, this is what happens when you speak up and organize.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cICE targeted her for speaking out against genocide,\u201d Representative Rashida Tlaib<\/a>, one of a number<\/a> of members<\/a> of Congress who have called for her release, said on X. Representative Nellie Cou of New Jersey, where Kordia lived with hermother, pressed ICE\u2019s acting director, Todd Lyons, about her case during an oversight hearing<\/a> on Tuesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhy have you failed to inform her family where she was sent and the status of her condition?\u201d Cou asked Lyons, as an aide held up a photo of Kordia. \u201cWhen will she be freed?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The New Jersey senators Andy Kim<\/a> and Cory Booker<\/a> also called for Kordia\u2019s release. New York City\u2019s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, called her detention \u201ccruel and unnecessary<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"a<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In a statement to the Guardian, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security dismissed Kordia\u2019s claims about medical neglect. \u201cFor many illegal aliens this is the best healthcare they receive in their entire lives,\u201d the spokesperson said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kordia was \u201cfound to be providing financial support to individuals living in nations hostile to the US\u201d, the spokesperson added. Kordia\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an op-ed<\/a> 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\u2019s commissary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOurs is a daily battle for basic dignity,\u201d she wrote of individuals held in ICE custody, while also nodding to the condition of \u201cthousands of Palestinians languishing in Israeli prisons\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kordia\u2019s cousin, Hamzah Abushaban, who visited her in detention before her seizure, told the Guardian she had become unrecognizable. \u201cShe\u2019s extremely weak, she\u2019s extremely sick, she\u2019s not herself,\u201d he said, adding that Kordia had been proud to move to the US.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnd all of this for what? For practicing her First Amendment right, her freedom of speech,\u201d Abushaban said. \u201cThe only reason why she\u2019s locked up is that the administration didn\u2019t like what she had to say.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reference Link:- https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/2026\/feb\/13\/leqaa-kordia-ice-detention-palestine-protest<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leqaa Kordia was taken into custody last March, nearly a year after being arrested at a protest at Columbia 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, with several elected officials weighing in after a medical […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29346,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[10003,10591,1510,17576,26992,26993,26994,4935],"class_list":["post-29344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sample-category","tag-genocide-2","tag-ice-2","tag-israel-2","tag-palestine-2","tag-prisoners-2","tag-protesters","tag-solidarity-with-palestine","tag-war-crimes-2","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29344"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29347,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29344\/revisions\/29347"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/29346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}