Meet the only demonstrator of the campus still locked up by Trump, a 32 -year -old Palestinian who grew up in the West Bank with aunts and uncles in Gaza

Now, many of these parents have died, killed in the war that destroyed a large part of the band. And more than 200 days after Kordia was swept away in the repression of the Trump administration against the pro-Palestinian demonstrators, she despairs of being unable to give a voice to her family.

“Most of the time, I feel helpless,” said Kordia, 32, speaking of a Texas immigration detention center where she has been imprisoned since March. “I want to do something, but I can’t from here. I can’t do anything. ”

Kordia, a Palestinian who has lived in New Jersey since 2016, was one of the first arrests of the government’s campaign against demonstrators, including many eminent activists. All the others were released.

Only Kordia – wrong by the government, largely neglected by the public and taken in a legal labyrinth – languid detention. In other words, in part because its history differs from most of the others who crowded campuses.

When she joined demonstrations against Israel outside the University of Columbia, she was not a student or part of a group that could have supported. While the arrests of activists like Mahmoud Khalil aroused the condemnation of elected officials and defenders, the case of Kordia has largely remained outside the eyes of the public.

And Kordia hesitated to draw attention to herself.

In her first interview since her arrest, Kordia recently said that she had been moved to protest due to deep personal ties with Gaza, where more than 170 parents were killed. The government has thrown these links as suspects, pointing to Kordia money transfers to parents in the Middle East as proof of possible links with terrorists.

Lawyers from the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to calls for comments. An agency spokesperson refused to answer questions about the case.

In a shared decision this week, a federal judge noted that the Trump administration illegally targeted demonstrators for speaking. This decision is not binding, however, in the highly conservative district where the case of Kordia is heard.

“The government has tried repeatedly to bring together a kind of justification to hold this young woman in detention indefinitely,” said her immigration lawyer Sarah Sherman-Stokes. “It does not seem to them to have any importance that they have no evidence.”

‘Go to the streets’

Kordia grew up in the city of Ramallah in the West Bank. Her parents divorced when she was a child and her mother remarried, finally becoming an American citizen. In 2016, Kordia came to the United States on a visitor’s visa, staying with his mother in Paterson, New Jersey, which houses one of the largest Arab communities in the country.

Shortly after, Kordia signed up for an English program and obtained a student visa. Her mother applied to let Kordia stay in the United States as a parent of a citizen.

The request was approved, but no visas was available. Government lawyers claim that Kordia has been illegally in the United States since she left school in 2022, making her status as a student and invalidating her visa. Kordia said that she believed that her mother’s request ensured her own legal status and that she was mistakenly followed by a teacher’s advice.

Kordia worked as a server in a Middle East restaurant on Palestine Way in Paterson while helping to take care of her half-brother, which is autism.

These routines were upset in October 2023, after Hamas attacked southern Israel, killing around 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages. Israel responded with a massive military campaign, killing more than 66,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is part of the government managed by Hamas.

During calls with parents in Gaza “They told me that” we are hungry. … We are afraid. We are cold. We have nowhere to go, ”said Kordia. “So my way of helping my family and my people was to go on the street.”

Kordia said that she had joined more than a dozen demonstrations in New York, New Jersey and Washington, DC in April 2024, she was arrested with 100 other demonstrators outside the doors of Columbia – accusations quickly rejected by prosecutors and sealed.

Shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump published decrees according to anti -Semitism demonstrations. DHS intelligence analysts began to assemble files on non-citizens who criticized Israel or protested against the war, on the basis of the Doxing Sites and the Police Information.

“For all resident foreigners who joined the pro-jihadist demonstrations, we have highlighted you,” said Trump in an information sheet accompanying orders. “Come 2025, we will find you and we will expel you.”

Monitoring, arrest and confusion

In March, immigration agents presented themselves at the home and at the workplace in Kordia, as well as in his uncle’s house in Florida. “The experience was very confusing,” she said. “It was like: why are you doing all this?”

Kordia hired a lawyer before accepting a meeting of March 13 with immigration and customs officials in Newark. She was immediately detained and stole the Prairieland detention center, south of Dallas.

Once there, she received a bare mattress on the ground and denied religious housing, including halal meals, said her lawyers.

When his cousin, Hamzah Abushaban, visited Kordia about a week after her arrest, he was surprised by the dark circles before his eyes and his state of confusion.

“One of the first things she asked for was why she was there,” said Abushaban. “She cried a lot. She looked like death. “

“I must have asked him a thousand times, as you have sure you have not committed a crime?” He said. “What she thought and I thought it was probably going to be a few more days of being detained has become almost, what, 7 months now.”

Kordia said that she did not understand the reasons for her detention for a week or two later, when a television of the establishment was settled on the news of the arrest of the demonstrations.

“I see my name, literally in big letters, on CNN and I said to myself, what happens?” She said.

Payments examined

Administration officials praised Kordia’s arrest in the context of the expulsion effort against those who “actively participated in anti-American and pro-terrorist activities”. A press release from the DHS noted its arrest the previous year during a “pro-Hamas” demonstration, labeling it by mistake as a student in Columbia.

Documents show that the New York police have given files of their arrest licensed to the DHS – an apparent violation of an law of the city prohibiting cooperation with the application of immigration. Federal officials told the police that information was needed in a criminal money laundering investigation, police spokesman said later.

During a deposit hearing for weeks later, government lawyers argued for Kordia’s continuing detention, stressing the assigned files showing that she had sent “large sums of money to Palestine and Jordan”.

Kordia said that she and her mother had sent the money, totaling $ 16,900 over eight years, to relatives. A payment of $ 1,000 in 2022 went to an aunt in Gaza whose house and hairdressing fair had been destroyed in an Israeli strike. Last year, two other payments went to a cousin who was fighting to feed his family.

“To hear the government accuse them of being terrorists and you accusing the money to terrorists, it is heartbreaking,” said Kordia.

An immigration judge, examining the transaction files and the declarations of relatives, found “overwhelming evidence” that Kordia was telling the truth about payments.

This judge ordered him twice released on bail. The government has challenged the decision, triggering a long appeal process – very unusual in immigration cases which do not imply serious crimes.

As a rule, when the government attacks someone to have exceeded a visa, it is rarely arrested, and even less held in prolonged detention, said Adam Cox, professor of immigration law at New York University.

“The type of scale, scope and publication of the campaign against the student demonstrators by the Trump administration really looks like nothing as we have seen in recent memory,” said Cox, who studies the rise of presidential power in immigration policy.

‘A person left behind’

Kordia asked for her release before the Federal Court, the same path taken by Khalil and others. The question of whether she succeeds can depend on a court of appeal in New York, which heard the arguments this week of government lawyers who argue that such a reparation should be largely prohibited for non-citizens.

Khalil, who was released in June, said he had closely followed the case of Kordia, asking lawyers to relay messages and remind his supporters “that there is a person who remains on behalf of”.

“She came directly from the West Bank, escaping the daily tests of the colonists and administrative detention only to face a version of this here,” said Khalil, referring to the practice of Israel to imprison the Palestinians indefinitely without accusation or trial. “It breaks my heart that she goes through all of this.”

While detention extends, Kordia said it was difficult to follow the developments in war, not to mention the contact with relatives taken in the conflict.

But that has given many hours to think about a time when war is finally over and it can find peace.

It would start by being gathered with her mother and other parents, she said, and perhaps one day having her own family. She dreams of opening a coffee and presenting people with Palestinian culture through food. She wants to pursue an American life.

“That’s all I wanted, to live with my family in peace in a country that appreciates freedom,” she said. “That’s literally everything I want.”