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Leqaa Kordia’s Long Road Home

The Palestinian activist was locked up in an ICE prison for a year. Now she is rebuilding her life, piece by piece and meal by meal.

Leqaa Kordia greets her supporters after being released from the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, on Monday, March 16, 2026.

Leqaa Kordia likes to feed people.

I learned this when I met her at Nouri Cafe on Main Street (also called Palestine Way) in Paterson, New Jersey. She walked confidently into the restaurant, greeting the staff warmly with quick hugs and light punches to the arm. As we sat at a table by a big window, she asked if I had eaten yet. 

During our conversation, an employee brought over a big plate of baked pasta, bubbling with cheese on top—their staff family meal. She immediately asked for a second plate and poured (far more than half) of the heaping portion onto it for me.

The food kept coming: falafel and cheese borek and baba ganoush. As Kordia poured me a bowl of molokhia, a savory jute leaf and chicken stew, she told me how people in her native Palestine eat it with crushed green chilis and lemon juice, while Syrians tend to have it with vinegar, onions, and fried pita. She made sure I tried it both ways—I preferred the added kick from the lemony chilis. I left Nouri loaded with our leftovers and clear instructions: Freeze the molokhia—it freezes well; have the dips and falafel for dinner.

Leqaa Kordia likes to feed people. But she hasn’t been eating much herself lately.

In March 2025, Kordia was arrested during a routine immigration appointment in New Jersey and shipped 1,500 miles away to Prairieland Detention Center outside Dallas. She was one of several people detained by ICE under the Trump administration after protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Kordia spent a full year in ICE jail—“I don’t like the word detention. It’s jail,” she says—despite facing no criminal charges. Her case shows how the administration has used the machinery of immigration enforcement to punish pro-Palestinian speech, and her experience inside reveals just how inhumane that punishment is. Now, Kordia lives in limbo: free from jail but unsure if she’ll be allowed to stay.

Kordia first came to the United States from the West Bank 10 years ago to reunite with her mother, an American citizen living in Paterson, home to one of the largest Palestinian diaspora communities in the country. This trip was Kordia’s first time leaving Palestine, her first time on a plane. She was leaving everything she knew behind: her friends and family, the place she called home, the Ka’ak Al Quds (Jerusalem bagel) from her favorite bakery, the taste of Palestinian water she still craves. But she was joining her mother.

“It’s the mother’s hug,” she says. “You can have all the problems in the world, but as soon as you get between your mother’s arms, it all goes away. That was the thing I was most longing for.” She remembers her first bite of mansaf—tender lamb slow-cooked in fermented yogurt and served over rice, cooked by her mom and her mom’s best friend—after her long, tiring travels.

Kordia built a life in Paterson. She learned English, made friends, and savored the stuffing and yams of her first Thanksgiving. “I like going to the salon. I love road trips. I love going to some museums, not all museums,” she says. She prefers going to the movies alone. “I don’t like anybody to talk to me while I’m watching…I was a very simple girl. I’m still a very simple girl. Or woman, I should say.”

Then the genocide began. The unfolding horror in her homeland, the intensification of the ongoing Nakba, became a constant presence in Kordia’s life. She has had over 200 extended family members killed by Israeli strikes. “It is impossible to not think about it,” she says. “You have a house, you have a roof on top of your head, you have food, you’re working, you’re studying, you’re traveling, while your family, your own people are starving, being ethnically cleansed, dehumanized and killed. They’re living in tents and walking miles to get a small gallon of water.”

Kordia found that she couldn’t eat much. When she tried, she would remember her family members who were being forced to starve by the Israeli government. “The feeling of guilt, the feeling of being helpless, are really two of the worst feelings ever.” She would go to protests, including one at Columbia University, where she was briefly arrested on charges of failure to disperse. All charges were later dropped. “I’m not an organizer. I’m not an activist. I’m simply a human being. Forget that I’m Palestinian. I’m a human being who protested against an ongoing genocide,” she says.

Kordia had been on a student visa while she studied English in Paterson, and petitioned for permanent residency through her mother. In 2021, the petition was approved. Based on incorrect legal advice at the time, she understood this to mean that she had legal status while she awaited her green card, so she let her student visa lapse.

On a cool morning, March 13, 2025, Kordia had an immigration appointment in Newark. She had been told there was some sort of issue with her application, “which was weird to me, because if there is an issue with the application they send you a mail or something.” But she wasn’t worried. “I hadn’t done anything wrong… I was like, ‘OK, everything is changing.’” She wore sneakers and sweatpants, ready for a long day of bureaucratic meetings.

Kordia drove to the immigration building with her stepdad and sister, and met her lawyer there. As she entered, her lawyer was stopped at the door and Kordia was........

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