Detained: The Last Columbia Protester
Radio Diaries
Radio Diaries & Radiotopia
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 3 November 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In April 2024, over 100 students were arrested during protests outside Columbia University, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Leqaa Kordia, a young Palestinian woman living in Paterson, New Jersey, was one of them.
Kordia was let go after the protests. But months later, ICE officials took her into custody and put her on a plane to a detention facility in Texas. Kordia has now been detained there for more than seven months. She is the last Columbia protestor still in detention.
Kordia's cousin, Hamzah Abushaban, talks to Kordia through a detention phone line almost every day. Today on the show, we'll hear one of those phone calls.
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