BREAKING🚨 ICE REFUSED to release a Palestinian woman they've held for a YEAR. She went in healthy, and has now suffered a seizure and spent 72 hours in a hospital, shackled at her wrists and ankles.
Leqaa Kordia, 33, was arrested on March 13, 2025, after she voluntarily showed up for a meeting with immigration officers in New Jersey.
The stated reason was an overstayed student (F-1) visa. She came from the West Bank in 2016, has lived in Paterson for a decade, and was working as a server.
Two separate judges ordered her release, and both were killed by an automatic stay filed by the Department of Homeland Security.
She had also been arrested outside a Columbia University protest against the war in Gaza in April 2024. Every charge from that arrest was promptly dismissed.
Kristi Noem, then Homeland Security secretary, publicly accused her of being a terrorist sympathizer and said the government was investigating money she sent overseas. Her lawyers say it was roughly $1,000 to relatives displaced in Gaza.
In court, her attorney Sarah Sherman-Stokes says the government abandoned the accusation entirely and offered no evidence for it.
At her third bond hearing in Dallas on March 13, exactly one year in, Immigration Judge Tara Naselow-Nahas said she had seen thousands of pages of evidence from Kordia and "very little evidence presented by the government in any of this."
She said Kordia "poses next to no flight risk" and set bond at $100,000. A government attorney had just argued that "no amount of bond" would be enough.
She ended up detained longer than any other pro-Palestinian protester swept up in the 2025 campus crackdown, the last of four Columbia protesters still held, as Jake Offenhartz first reported in Associated Press.
Kordia is now diagnosed with epilepsy and takes anti-seizure medication daily.
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