Palestinian Activist Leqaa Kordia Speaks Out on “Filthy and Inhumane” Conditions in Texas ICE Detention
After a year in ICE custody, Kordia describes medical neglect, humiliation, overcrowding, and the echoes of life under occupation.
After a year in ICE custody, Leqaa Kordia is speaking publicly about the medical neglect, humiliation, overcrowding, and indifference she says she witnessed inside a Texas detention center — and the parallels she now sees between immigration detention in the United States and life under Israeli occupation.
After spending a year inside a Texas immigration detention center, Palestinian activist Leqaa Kordia is speaking publicly about what she describes as filthy and inhumane conditions in ICE custody. In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Kordia said she sees “a lot of similarities” between the treatment of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and the treatment of people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention.
Kordia was detained by ICE after her arrest at an April 2024 protest outside Columbia University against Israel’s war in Gaza. The charges from that arrest were dropped the next day. More than 200 members of her extended family were killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza, and she said she never thought of herself as an activist so much as “just a Palestinian girl, protesting her family being killed”.
“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. “Now, I’ll advocate on behalf of the ladies I left behind.” She was referring to the women she lived alongside in 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. Her release came after an immigration judge ruled for the third time that she posed no threat and should be freed on bond. Legislators and human rights groups had also been pressing for her release, and the order came after she was hospitalized on 6 February following a seizure in detention.
She has lived in the United States for nearly a decade. After growing up in the West Bank with her father, she came to reunite with her mother, a U.S. citizen. She has no criminal record and has a pending green card application through her mother. Her arrest happened around the same time as the detentions of Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, both Palestinian Columbia University students. A federal judge in Boston ruled that their detention was unconstitutional and intentionally designed to chill speech.
🎥 Leqaa Kordia speaking out about conditions inside the Texas ICE detention facility.
For Kordia, detention in Texas did not feel disconnected from what she had known as a child in Palestine. When she was nine years old during the second intifada, she woke to find an Israeli soldier in her bedroom pointing a gun at her. Her family was living under curfew. Snipers had been stationed on the roof for days, and tanks lined the streets outside. Checkpoints, raids, and daily humiliations were already part of life. She had once watched soldiers knock her brother unconscious. But the soldier in her room was a terror she said stayed with her. “As soon as I opened my eyes I saw that soldier laughing — literally laughing — and pointing his rifle in my face,” she said.
In Texas, she said, she heard that same kind of cruelty echoed back in a different setting. Guards, she said, ignored detainees when they asked for help, told women to “shut up”, and laughed at them. Asked to describe daily life in detention, Kordia said she could go on for days. She spent weeks sleeping on a paper-thin mattress on the floor because the dorm was so overcrowded. She said her religious rights were disregarded. She said medical neglect became so severe that it led to her hospitalization.
The building was kept freezing cold, she said, and when women complained, guards told them the low temperature was for protection against “germs”. During intake, women who asked for water were directed to a fountain attached to a toilet. When the showers stopped working, she said guards answered complaints with a shrug: “It is what it is.” At times, she said, the drinking water had “things swimming in it”.
Meals were served at 4 a.m., 10 a.m., and 4 p.m. She said the food was often inedible. Detainees called it “dog food”, but refusing to eat could bring punishment. Women risked being placed on “suicide watch” in isolation. “People can literally grow crazy in those places,” Kordia said. She described panic attacks, emotional breakdowns, and guards who remained indifferent as women suffered in front of them. There were pregnant women there, elderly women there, and sick women there. She said it made no difference. “They just didn’t care,” she said.
She also condemned the frequent transfers from one detention center to another, saying people were shuffled around in ways that caused them to miss court hearings. She called that practice “human trafficking”. “The word ‘detention center’ sounds nice,” she said. “It’s not nice. It’s a jail.”
Kordia said many people talking about ICE still do not really understand what immigration detention feels like from the inside. She thought she knew enough before she was detained. “It turns out I didn’t know,” she said.
And yet what she remembers alongside the humiliation is the solidarity. Inside detention, women built bonds across language barriers, nationalities, and life histories. They traded relatives’ phone numbers so families could be notified if someone was deported or transferred. When Kordia was hospitalized, her own family learned where she was only because another detainee got word out. For three days, they tried to get ICE to tell them where she had been taken.
She recalled women using the dorm microwave to prepare food for one another when someone was sick. Birthdays were marked with commissary items. When she collapsed and had a seizure, she said another detainee insisted that guards send her hijab with her to the hospital. “I was sent far away from my community in New Jersey, all the way to Texas, for them to isolate me,” she said. Instead, she found another community. “When somebody cries, everybody cries,” she said. “When somebody laughs, everybody laughs.”
She also used that time to talk with other detainees — and with any guards willing to listen — about Palestine. Some already understood. Others were hearing about it in fuller detail for the first time. She had a copy of a book by Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed early in the war in an Israeli strike, and detainees who spoke English passed it around and read it eagerly. “We all came from countries where we know what war is. We know what struggle is, we know what poverty is, so it wasn’t hard for them to relate,” she said.
For Kordia, the common thread was humiliation. She said the stripping away of dignity she had known in Palestine was something anyone in immigration detention would understand immediately. “They don’t call you by name,” she said. “They call you ‘subject’, or by number.” That was true, she said, of ICE guards and Israeli soldiers alike.
When she left Palestine for the United States in 2016, she believed she was entering a country built on freedom. “Everybody can say whatever they want and do whatever they want,” she recalled thinking. “I really used to believe that.” Before detention, she was working as a server at a Palestinian restaurant in Paterson and hoped to open a cafe of her own. Now she is uncertain what comes next. Although an immigration court has granted her temporary protection, the administration is still pursuing her deportation.
Still, while she does not call herself an activist, she says speaking out is no longer optional. “The least I can do is talk about what those I left behind are facing every day,” she said.
Kordia left detention, but many of the women she is describing are still inside, still enduring the same cold, neglect, humiliation, and abandonment she says defined daily life there.
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