The last person still in federal immigration custody from the 2024 Columbia University pro-Palestine protests walked out of a Texas detention center on a $100,000 bond — after a year of imprisonment without ever being charged with a crime, and after a federal judge ordered her release for the third time over the Justice Department's appeals.
On Monday, March 16, 2026, Leqaa Kordia — a 33-year-old Palestinian woman, born in the West Bank, who has lived in New Jersey since 2016 — was released from a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Texas, more than a year after federal agents arrested her in March 2025. She was one of roughly 100 people taken into custody outside Columbia University during the 2024 spring wave of pro-Palestine campus demonstrations.
Kordia was the last of those 2024 Columbia protest detainees still in federal immigration custody. She had never been charged with a crime in the United States.
The case
The federal government's stated immigration grounds for her detention shifted over the course of the year — initially asserting visa-status irregularities, later relying on the same Immigration and Nationality Act "foreign policy deportability" provision and Rubio-memo theory used against Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Yunseo Chung. Her attorneys, civil-rights groups, and a federal judge consistently disputed each rationale.
An immigration judge had ordered her release on bond. The Department of Justice appealed. A federal district judge ordered her release. The DOJ appealed again. As Defending Rights & Dissent reported on March 16, the order under which she finally walked out was the third such order — the federal court system, repeatedly presented with the government's evidence, repeatedly found no lawful basis to keep her locked up.
What it cost her
Kordia spent more than 365 days in ICE detention in Texas, separated from her family in New Jersey, on the strength of allegations the federal courts would not credit. Her bond was set at $100,000. She walked out on Monday afternoon and said, per CBS New York reporters at the gate: "I'm not free inside until everyone is free."
What her release means
NPR framed it bluntly: this is the end of the federal immigration-detention arc for the 2024 Columbia campus protests. The administration's targeted-deportation theory, applied across this cluster of cases through the Rubio memo and the Khalil-Mahdawi-Chung-Öztürk-Kordia chain, has now produced zero successful deportations of Columbia protesters. Every one of the named lead-plaintiff figures has been released by federal court order, and most are continuing their immigration proceedings outside of custody under preliminary injunctions that constrain ICE's ability to re-detain them.
The underlying legal questions — whether the State Department's "foreign policy" deportability theory survives First Amendment scrutiny, whether ICE may use immigration detention as a content-based censorship instrument against non-citizen political speech, and whether the federal courts will continue to push back on the DOJ's repeated appeals of release orders — remain live. Kordia's case is one of several headed toward higher-court rulings that will set durable precedent for everyone subject to the same federal targeting.
For now, on March 16, 2026, the last of the 2024 Columbia protest defendants is home. The cost was a year of her life.
