type: timeline_event
On March 16, 2026, Leqaa Kordia — a Palestinian woman who had lived in New Jersey since 2016 — was released from Prairieland Detention Center in Texas on $100,000 bond, making her the last person to be freed from the Trump administration's 2025 crackdown on campus protesters. Kordia's release marked the end of a detention campaign that had drawn condemnation from civil liberties organizations, academic institutions, and legal scholars as an unprecedented use of immigration enforcement to punish political speech.
Immigration Judge Tara Naslow's comments during the bond hearing underscored the weakness of the government's case. The judge noted that she had reviewed "thousands of pages of evidence from respondent, very little from government," suggesting that Kordia and her legal team had compiled a far more substantial record than ICE had managed to produce to justify her continued detention. The disparity in evidence was consistent with a pattern critics had identified across the campus protest detentions: arrests and detention appeared to be driven by political motivations rather than legitimate immigration enforcement priorities.
Kordia had been swept up in a wave of arrests targeting students and community members who participated in campus protests against the administration's policies. The crackdown began in 2025 and relied on identifying protesters with immigration vulnerabilities — visa holders, DACA recipients, and legal permanent residents who could be subjected to removal proceedings as a consequence of protest activity. Civil liberties organizations argued that the strategy was deliberately designed to chill free speech by making political participation a deportation risk for immigrants.
The $100,000 bond imposed as a condition of Kordia's release reflected the punitive approach that had characterized the campus detention cases throughout. Legal advocates noted that bonds in comparable immigration cases typically ranged from $5,000 to $25,000, and that the inflated amount was consistent with the administration's pattern of using detention conditions to impose maximum hardship on individuals it had targeted for political reasons.