eligible to be released<\/a> on bond three times. Immigration officials appealed the first two rulings, but Kordia was freed on a $100,000 bond after government lawyers did not challenge the third.<\/p>\nAfter her release, Kordia said she was looking forward to going home and hugging her mother \u201cso hard\u201d. But she also said she would keep fighting on behalf of people still being held at the detention centre.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is a lot of injustice in this place,\u201d she said. \u201cThere is a lot of people that shouldn\u2019t be here in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kordia, who lost nearly 200 members of her family during Israel\u2019s genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, was among several protesters targeted by immigration officials for taking part in pro-Palestine demonstrations at Columbia University in 2024.<\/p>\n
Until Monday, she was the only person targeted in connection with the demonstration who was still in immigration detention after the release of others, including\u00a0Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi.<\/p>\n
Kordia, who was held at Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, was recently hospitalised for three days following a seizure after fainting and hitting her head at the privately run detention facility.<\/p>\n
At a hearing on Friday, Kordia\u2019s lawyers said she had a neurological condition that had worsened while in custody, putting her at an elevated risk of seizure. They reiterated that she could stay with US citizen family members and did not pose a flight risk.<\/p>\n
The immigration judge, Tara Naslow, agreed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve heard testimony. I\u2019ve seen thousands of pages of evidence presented by the respondent, and very little evidence presented by the government in any of this,\u201d Naslow said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The 33-year-old Columbia University protester had been held in immigration detention centre for a year. Listen to this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":527808,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,12,2563,3,21,19,22,20,25,1209,24],"class_list":["post-527807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-donald-trump","tag-israel-palestine-conflict","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-us-canada","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=527807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/527808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=527807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=527807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=527807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}