Targeted for Gaza protests: The Palestinian student still in US custody

Leqaa Kordia's lawyers tell Middle East Eye she was not even aware she did not possess the correct visa status

Leqaa Kordia's lawyers filed a petition in her federal lawsuit seeking her immediate release from the Prairieland Detention Facility based on new evidence unearthed last month in a separate case (MEE/Photo supplied by Kordia's legal team)

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Of all the high-profile, pro-Palestine, non-US citizen student arrests made by the Trump administration's immigration authorities earlier this year, Leqaa Kordia is the only one still languishing in a detention centre in Alvaredo, Texas.

On Monday, the 32-year-old's lawyers filed an updated petition in her federal lawsuit seeking her immediate release from the Prairieland Detention Facility based on new evidence unearthed last month in a separate case.

The case in question is American Association of University Professors (AAUP) v. Rubio, which sought to challenge Secretary of State Marco Rubio's policy of what the plaintiffs describe as a "policy of ideological deportation".

It was during the AAUP v. Rubio trial that government officials revealed they leaned on the pro-Israel doxxing site Canary Mission to target particular students for immigration detention.

"The evidence shows that the administration's policy of targeting, investigating, surveilling, arresting, confining and seeking the deportation of noncitizens who have expressed support for Palestinians extends to anyone involved in protests on or near campuses, irrespective of affiliation with a campus or immigration status," a statement from Kordia's legal representatives at the Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP), Muslim Advocates (MA), and the CLEAR Project at the City University of New York (CUNY) said.

"This new evidence makes clear that Ms Kordia's targeting is part and parcel of the same, suppressive policy the administration has weaponised against so many others, including Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk and Mohsen Mahdawi, whose release federal courts have compelled under the First Amendment," the statement continued.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) attempted to strip Khalil, Ozturk and Mahdawi of their legal status in the US at the time they were taken away by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents (ICE).

For Kordia, the DHS maintains that she was already out of status at the time she was arrested in New Jersey, and issued a statement on 14 March insisting she was "overstaying her expired F-1 student visa", which was terminated on 26 January 2022 for "lack of attendance".

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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.

"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, told Middle East Eye.

She thought she was close to becoming a lawful permanent resident because her US citizen family had filed for such a status on her behalf, Thabateh explained. But upon receiving "faulty advice" from a mentor, Kordia voluntarily signed a termination notice, withdrawing from the F-1 visa program, leaving her out of status entirely.

"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."

'Forgotten prisoner'

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, was initially a visitor before adjusting her status to a student as she began learning English.

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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 to find out what was happening 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, that she was served with a notice to appear in court, and then taken away overnight to the Texas facility.

Kordia has frequently described poor and discriminatory treatment at the Prairieland Detention Facility to her legal team, but they say that she's persevering.

"I think that her spirits are strong, but the conditions she's enduring are not easy," Golnaz Fakhimi, the legal director at Muslim Advocates, told MEE.

Authorities interfered with her ability to observe Ramadan and did not provide accommodations so she could carry out her five daily prayers as a Muslim, Kordia had told renowned Muslim scholar and civil rights activist Omar Suleiman, who was granted a visit with her in May.

He had called her "the forgotten prisoner" in an op-ed published earlier this year.

"In litigation, the government has taken the position that that her confinement is based on having overstayed a visa, [but] the authority that the government has asserted... is a discretionary authority," Fakhimi said. "She is not someone who, by law, has to be confined."

"The underlying policy of the administration to target non-citizens - according to the government's own officials who testified - really zeroed in on association with viewpoints supportive of Palestine," she added. "I think it's pretty clear what there is to see when you read between the lines. They're confining her because they have marching orders to do that pursuant to an umbrella-level policy."

On 27 June, US Magistrate Judge Rebecca Rutherford recommended to the federal judge in the case filed against DHS Secretary Kristi Noem - Kordia v. Noem - that Kordia should be released, given the main threat present is one to her own liberty.

She remains in custody after a government appeal.

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