Leqaa Kordia, longest-detained pro-Palestine protester, freed from ICE custody
After spending two consecutive Ramadans behind bars, Leqaa Kordia was freed from US immigration detention on Monday, in what her lawyers have described as a "staggering" $100,000 bond.
Her legal team said the bond was "nonetheless...paid immediately".
The 33-year-old Palestinian immigrant, whose home is in New Jersey, was released from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, after the Trump administration chose not to challenge what was a third release order by an immigration judge.
It had previously appealed the first and second orders for her release.
"I’m free! I’m free! Finally, after one year," Kordia said as she walked out to a group of waiting supporters, with a Palestinian keffiyeh draped around her shoulders.
“There is a lot of injustice in this place,” she added. “There is a lot of people that shouldn’t be here in the first place.”
Kordia's cousin, Hamzah Abushaban, told Middle East Eye on Tuesday that Kordia was in relatively good spirits and already at the mosque for Ramadan prayers by Monday evening.
"It was an extremely emotional day" for me, he said of receiving the call about Kordia's release. Abushaban is based in South Florida.
"I had to pull over at a random gas station to process it all, and started crying," he said.
Last month, Kordia had to be hospitalised after fainting, hitting her head, and suffering a seizure. She had never experienced seizures before, her family said.
While in hospital for three days, Kordia was chained to the bed before being taken back to the detention centre. Her lawyers also expressed concerns about her weight loss.
New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani said on social media that he raised Kordia's case with President Donald Trump during their meeting last month, adding that he is "grateful" for her release after she spoke up for "Palestinian rights".
Of all the arrests linked to pro-Palestine campus protests made by the Trump administration last year, Kordia was the last one still languishing in detention.
"This is a one hundred percent Islamophobic, anti-Palestinian liberation issue because she spoke out against Israel," Abushaban told MEE.
"It's heartbreaking...it's not the America I thought I was born in," he added.
During a trial last year in a separate case, American Association of University Professors v Rubio, which sought to challenge Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s alleged “policy of ideological deportation”, US officials revealed that they had relied on the pro-Israel doxxing site Canary Mission to identify students for immigration detention.
Legal status
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) maintains that Kordia did not have lawful status at the time she was arrested in New Jersey on 13 March 2025, and issued a statement the following day, insisting she was "overstaying her expired F-1 student visa", which had been terminated on 26 January 2022 for "lack of attendance".
The DHS also cited Kordia's arrest by the New York Police Department in April 2024 during a protest against Israel's war on Gaza, organised by Columbia University students. The police, however, had arrested several students at the time, and Kordia was eventually let go after charges against her were dropped.
She was enrolled at Columbia and had joined the protest as a show of solidarity.
"It is true that at that time she did not have lawful status," Amal Thabateh, a staff attorney at Clear, who is working on Kordia's case, previously told MEE.
She thought she was close to becoming a lawful permanent resident because her US-citizen family had filed for that status on her behalf, Thabateh explained.
But after receiving "faulty advice" from a mentor, Kordia voluntarily signed a termination notice, withdrawing from the F-1 visa programme and leaving her entirely out of status.
"We all know based on how other cases have gone, and just routinely [that] this happens all the time where people have losses in status," Thabateh told MEE. "They're in transition periods... and that's quickly solved and fixed."
But that wasn't the case in what is now the era of enforcement under US President Donald Trump's aggressive immigration crackdown targeting pro-Palestine voices.
"The ways in which the government has criminalised the visa overstay is just another attempt to target Palestinian rights activists," Thabateh said. "The question is not whether overstaying a visa is criminal or a violation, but instead it's whether the ways in which Leqaa has been punished and targeted, whether that is a justification for very innocently following false advice about her immigration status."
Kordia arrived in the US from the occupied West Bank in 2016 on a Palestinian Authority passport, and was initially a visitor before adjusting her status to a student, as she began learning English.
She has lost 200 extended family members to Israel's genocide in Gaza.
Thabateh told MEE that Kordia voluntarily went to meet with immigration agents after learning that people who knew her were being questioned about her life, and that agents had also approached her home.
It was during that meeting in Newark, New Jersey, on 13 March, that she was served with a notice to appear in court and then taken to the Texas facility overnight.
Kordia frequently described poor and discriminatory treatment at the Prairieland Detention Facility to her legal team, including inedible food, unsanitary conditions, and no religious accommodations.
This article was sourced from Middle East Eye.
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