When Leqaa Kordia arrived at a meeting with ICE agents in 2025, she didn’t know that would be the last breath of fresh air she would take for more than a year. “I got arrested, and I was thrown into an unmarked van, and they brought me all the way from New Jersey to Texas.”
Kordia, who was freed last month, joins Mehdi to highlight just how bad the conditions were inside the detention center she was kept in - one of many that have sprung up all over the country since Trump took office. “I actually stayed sleeping on the floor for three months straight,” Kordia tells Mehdi, adding that she saw women who were seven and eight months pregnant in her ‘dorm’. “I thought that I knew about these things… but the reality was absolutely shocking.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says it detained Kordia for overstaying an expired F-1 student visa, but also cited her role in Columbia University’s 2024 pro-Palestine protests, which likely made her a target for ICE. But despite her detention, Kordia says she wouldn’t have done anything differently. “I don’t regret doing it, and I will still call for the end of the genocide… I will still call for a Palestine to be free from the river to the sea.”
Paid subscribers can watch the full interview above to hear how ICE used chains to shackle Kordia to a hospital bed after suffering a seizure during her detention, how her transfer to Texas was a tactic to ensure her deportation, and to hear some of the other horror stories she witnessed in what she described as “jail or dungeon” rather than a detention center.
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