Biography
Leqaa Kordia is a Palestinian woman and longtime New Jersey resident who was detained by ICE in March 2025 as part of the Trump administrations campaign of immigration enforcement against participants in pro-Palestinian campus protests. She had attended demonstrations in the Columbia University area. She was arrested in Newark and transferred to the Prairieland Detention Center in Texas, where she was held for months. Federal authorities cited an alleged visa overstay rather than any criminal charge, but the targeting was widely understood as retaliation for her protest activity. She was released on March 16, 2026 on $100,000 bond. On March 19, the federal court dismissed her habeas petition without prejudice as moot following that release; this was not a ruling on the merits of her constitutional allegations.
The October 14, 2025 UN allegation letter distinguishes Kordia’s April 30, 2024 protest arrest from her March 13, 2025 ICE detention. An April 16 bond order was stayed and did not produce physical release. Her independently documented March 16, 2026 release is a later event and is not displaced by the letter’s account of continuing detention in 2025. Source: https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadPublicCommunicationFile?gId=30402#page=8
Release confirmed by the federal court
The March 19, 2026 memorandum opinion expressly records Leqaa Kordia's physical release from immigration custody on March 16, 2026 on $100,000 bond after an immigration judge's order. The release date was already recorded in the custody case and is retained unchanged. The court dismissed the habeas action without prejudice as moot because she was no longer detained, not because the immigration proceedings ended or because it adjudicated the constitutional allegations in her favor. The signature, filing and PDF-modification dates are not release dates. The opinion supplies no new date of birth or physical admission endpoint.
