Calls Grow for Release of Palestinian Who Has Been Jailed by ICE Since March |
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Calls are growing to release Palestinian protester Leqaa Kordia, who was arrested at a 2024 Columbia University Gaza solidarity protest. The charges were dismissed, but when she went to her ICE check-in this past March, she was arrested and immediately sent to the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, where she has been held ever since. Although Columbia University student protesters like Mohsen Mahdawi and Mahmoud Khalil have been freed from ICE detention, “her case sort of fell between the cracks,” says Laila El-Haddad, Palestinian writer and journalist from Gaza, who just visited Kordia. El-Haddad also criticizes the Trump administration’s effort to “crack down on any dissent and use immigration law, to weaponize immigration law to silence dissent and to criminalize free speech, especially when that speech relates to Palestine.”
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.
We end today’s show looking at the growing calls to release a Palestinian woman from New Jersey who has been held in ICE detention in Texas for nearly 10 months. Leqaa Kordia was arrested last year at a Gaza solidarity protest at Columbia University, but the charges were dismissed. Then, when she went to her ICE check-in this past March, she was arrested and immediately sent to the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, where she’s been held ever since. Lawyers from CLEAR and the Texas Civil Rights Project and Boston University School of Law Immigrants’ Rights Clinic are helping on her case.
NPR’s Radio Diaries recently aired part of a phone call between Leqaa Kordia and her cousin Hamzah Abushaban, who talks to her almost every day.
LEQAA KORDIA: I received a call from my mother telling me, “There are people asking for you from the government.” At the beginning, I felt like they were missing a form or something. OK, I’m just going to solve this issue, and then, like, I’ll have my green card soon. But they took my fingerprints and all that. They said, “You’re going to Texas.” I said, “Texas? Like, that’s really far away.” And when I arrived to Texas, the place was overcrowded.
HAMZAH ABUSHABAN: How many people are there with you?
LEQAA KORDIA: So, right now we’re 87, and the capacity of this place is 37. It’s a lot of people sleeping on the........