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”.
