03/19/2026
The worst moment came when Leqaa Kordia woke up shackled at her wrists and ankles to a hospital bed, terrified, with no memory of how she got there. It was her first seizure -- brought on, doctors told her, by months of poor sleep, inadequate nutrition, and relentless stress. "All I felt was fear, not knowing what was happening to me," she later reflected.
Witnesses told her she had collapsed twice. An ambulance took her to the hospital -- in chains. "For three days in the emergency room, my hands and legs were weighed down by heavy chains as they drew my blood and gave me medications. I felt like an animal."
When she asked why she was still shackled, a lieutenant told her: "Because I said so." Guards wouldn't let her call her family. Her attorneys were turned away. For 72 hours, her mother didn't know what hospital her daughter was in -- or whether she was alive.
Doctors advised her to eat better and reduce her stress. "I don't know how I can do that while I'm confined," she wrote. "At Prairieland, your daily life -- whether you can have access to the food or medicine you need or even a good night's sleep -- is controlled by the private, for-profit business that runs this facility." Then they sent her back to detention.
Leqaa Kordia was never charged with a crime. Three separate times, a judge ordered her release. It was not until yesterday -- after a full year of suffering-- that she finally walked free.
Leqaa, 33, was born in East Jerusalem and grew up in Ramallah. Her mother, a naturalized U.S. citizen, settled in Paterson, New Jersey. Leqaa came to the U.S. in 2016 as a student, later dropping out after her mother filed a petition for permanent residency, which was approved in 2021. While waiting for her green card, she waitressed and helped care for her mother and her autistic half-brother.
During Israel's two-year assault on Gaza, nearly 200 of her relatives were killed. "My way of helping my family and my people was to go to the streets," she told the Associated Press. On April 30, 2024, she joined a nonviolent protest outside the gates of Columbia University. She was not a student, not an organizer, not affiliated with any group -- just one of roughly 100 people swept up in a police action for blocking a gate. All charges were dropped.
Leqaa assumed it was over and moved on with her life. But an officer inside the NYPD's Real Time Crime Center had passed her sealed arrest record to the Department of Homeland Security, which claimed it needed the information for a money laundering investigation. The disclosure violated state law. The NYPD later opened an investigation into the officer's actions.
Nearly a year later, Leqaa went to a routine immigration check-in at the ICE field office in Newark -- voluntarily, with her attorney. Her attorney was barred from the meeting. "I felt like they were missing a form or something," she recalled. "OK, I'm just going to solve this issue."
Instead, she was detained on the spot, placed in an unmarked van, and flown 1,500 miles to the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas -- run by the for-profit prison company LaSalle Corrections. "They said, 'You're going to Texas.' I said, 'Texas? That's really far away.'"
Her cousin Hamzah Abushaban visited within the first week. They spoke through thick glass on a phone. "The very first thing she said was, 'Hamzah, why am I here?'" he told NPR. "She looked like death."
Leqaa described the facility in an op-ed she wrote in USA Today: "For months, I slept in a plastic shell, known as a 'boat,' surrounded by cockroaches and only a thin blanket." In a phone call with her cousin months later: "Right now, we're 87, and the capacity of this place is 37. Maybe another word to describe this place -- a big bathroom. Everything is open. There is no privacy." She was denied halal meals. "I've been here for 11 months, and the food is so bad it makes me sick."
The government claimed she had provided "material support" to Hamas. Their evidence: DHS subpoenaed her MoneyGram and Western Union records and found transfers to relatives in the Middle East -- money for food and other essentials for survival for family trapped in a war zone.
The only specific transfer that DHS presented in court was a $1,000 MoneyGram to relatives in Gaza. That was it. Her attorneys submitted thousands of pages proving the transfers were exactly what she said. Immigration Judge Tara Naselow-Nahas was unequivocal: "There is no evidence in the record that this person supports Hamas or is a member of a terrorist organization."
On April 3, 2025, the judge ordered her released on $20,000 bond. Her cousin paid it the next day. ICE blocked her release the same day. "The judge ruled that I should be released," Leqaa told NPR, "and ICE appealed the same day, saying that I'm dangerous, I went for a protest and all that."
Under immigration law, ICE can file what's called an "automatic stay" -- a procedural tool that immediately freezes a judge's release order without any judicial review. They used it twice. "The second time, the judge ruled immediate release again, and again, ICE appealed the same day," she explained.
On Friday -- one year to the day -- Judge Naselow-Nahas ordered her released a third time, setting bond at $100,000. She told the court she had seen "thousands of pages of evidence presented by the respondent, and very little evidence presented by the government," and called the government's arguments "disingenuous." The DHS attorney responded that "no amount of bond" would be sufficient. This time, the government let the deadline to invoke the stay pass without acting.
When she walked out of Prairieland, Leqaa announced: "I'm free! I'm free! Finally, after one year." She said she couldn't wait to hug her mother "so hard." But she also said she'd keep fighting for those still inside: "There is a lot of injustice in this place. There is a lot of people that shouldn't be here in the first place."
"Leqaa should not have spent a single moment in ICE detention, let alone an entire year," said Amal Thabateh, staff attorney with CLEAR, one of the legal organizations representing Leqaa. "Leqaa, like others, was punished for speaking out in defense of Palestinians, including her own family."
American taxpayers spent well over $60,000 to imprison this woman -- who had previously been an employed taxpayer -- for a year in conditions so bad she suffered seizures. She was never charged with a crime, her only "offense" standing outside a gate at a protest after nearly 200 of her relatives were killed. The government's entire case rested on a $1,000 money transfer to starving family members. This is how the Trump administration claims to be making America safer.
The only beneficiary is LaSalle Corrections, the for-profit company that runs Prairieland and 17 other facilities holding over 13,000 people. ICE has called LaSalle "an important part" of its detention operations. LaSalle has a documented history of human rights abuses and is currently the subject of congressional scrutiny. As the administration holds a record 66,000 people in ICE custody -- nearly three-quarters with no criminal conviction, and many of the rest for offenses as minor as traffic violations -- companies like LaSalle collect $165 per detainee per day from the taxpayer.
Leqaa's attorney Travis Fife of the Texas Civil Rights Project: "Leqaa going home today is the bare minimum. We must continue to assert the fundamental First Amendment principle that the government cannot abuse power to punish people for using their voice."
Throughout her year inside, Leqaa kept drawing attention to the women the public never sees. "ICE detention facilities are built to break people and destroy their health and hope. I want everyone to know what happened to me because the same things are happening to other women who are locked up here. There are women who have terminal cancer, disabled women, pregnant women. They are all suffering, and none of us deserves to be here. No one deserves this."
A week before her release, on International Women's Day, Leqaa declared: "Remember those of us locked behind these walls. Listen to our words. Demand accountability. We are still here. No matter how hard they fight to erase or silence us, we will not be forgotten."
Leqaa Kordia is free. But her case is not over -- she still faces removal proceedings and will have to fight to stay in the country she has called home for a decade. And the women she spoke about -- the ones with terminal cancer, the pregnant women, the ones the public never sees -- are still inside Prairieland, sleeping in the same plastic shells surrounded by filth and vermin, eating the same food that made Leqaa sick, with no cameras pointed in their direction and no judge ordering their release.
Leqaa used her voice from inside a detention cell for a year. Now it's time for us to use ours. Here's how to take action:
--> To help Leqaa rebuild her life after a year of unjust detention and continue her legal fight to stay in the U.S., you can donate to her fundraising campaign at https://chuffed.org/project/freeleqaa
--> To support the Texas Civil Rights Project, which represented Leqaa and continues to fight for the rights of people in immigration detention across Texas, visit https://www.txcivilrights.org/
--> To demand accountability for conditions inside for-profit immigration detention facilities, call your Senators and Representatives at (202) 224-3121. Tell them that no one should be imprisoned for a year without charges for attending a protest -- and that the women still inside deserve the same scrutiny Leqaa's case finally received.
