The Guardian reports:

A Palestinian woman who was released last month after spending a year in a Texas immigration detention center told the Guardian in an exclusive interview that she sees “a lot of similarities” between the treatment of people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody and that of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

Leqaa Kordia, who was detained by ICE following her arrest at a protest against Israel’s war in Gaza, says that she will continue to speak up about the rights of Palestinians, but that she now also sees it as her duty to denounce the “human tragedy” of immigration detention in the US.

“When I took to the streets, I was defending my rights, and my family’s rights, and calling for freedom for myself and freedom for my family,” Kordia said of her participation in an April 2024 pro-Palestinian protest outside Columbia University, where she was arrested along with dozens of others. The charges against her were dropped the following day. More than 200 members of her extended family were killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza and Kordia didn’t see herself as an activist, she says, but rather “just a Palestinian girl, protesting her family being killed”.

“Now, I’ll advocate on behalf of the ladies I left behind,” she said, referring to the women with whom she shared an overcrowded dorm at the Prairieland detention center in Alvarado, Texas. “I was advocating on behalf of my family in Palestine, and now I’m advocating on behalf of my family here in America … Now I have a bigger family.”

Kordia spoke with the Guardian at a Palestinian cafe in Paterson, New Jersey, home to one of the largest Palestinian American communities in the country, two weeks after returning home – after an immigration judge for the third time ruled that she posed no threat and ordered her release on bond. Her release followed mounting pressure from legislators and human rights groups, and came after her 6 February hospitalization for a seizure she had while in detention.

Kordia has been living in the US for nearly a decade after leaving the West Bank, where she grew up with her father, to reunite with her mother, who is a US citizen. She has a pending green card application via her mother and no criminal record.

She was arrested around the same time as Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi – both Palestinian and Columbia University students – whose detention a federal judge in Boston ruled was unconstitutional and intentionally designed to chill speech.

Her time in ICE custody has brought back many memories of her childhood in Palestine, Kordia says.

When she was nine years old, during the second intifada, she woke up one day to an Israeli soldier in her bedroom, pointing a gun at her. [Continue reading…]