(RNS) — After being hospitalized and unreachable by her lawyers and family for three days, Leqaa Kordia, a 33-year-old Muslim Palestinian woman who has been detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for nearly a year, was discharged and returned to detention on Monday (Feb. 9).

Kordia’s lawyers said in a statement that the Department of Homeland Security denied multiple requests for answers about where she was hospitalized and her condition for over 72 hours, raising concerns about the agency’s transparency and medical care.

“While we are relieved Leqaa is out of the hospital, we still have no idea what her medical condition is and what happened to her the past three days,” said Hamzah Abushaban, Kordia’s cousin, in a statement. “Now she is forced back to the nightmarish conditions of ICE detention that put her in the hospital.”

Kordia’s legal team said it called dozens of hospitals near the Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas, over the weekend, but only learned of her location from a journalist to whom DHS had released that detail. DHS cited safety concerns in refusing to confirm the hospital location to her family, Kordia’s counsel said. She had previously struggled with dizziness and shown other signs of poor nutrition at the detention facility, her lawyers said.

On Friday, Kordia had a seizure and was admitted to Texas Health Huguley Hospital in Burleson, Texas, “out of an abundance of caution,” a DHS spokesperson told Religion News Service on Monday. The spokesperson did not answer questions about why Kordia’s legal team was not told her location and condition. 

Kordia has been detained at the North Texas detention center since last March. Her legal team has argued that Kordia, who was born in Jerusalem and has family in Gaza, was targeted by ICE for protesting against Israel’s war in Gaza near Columbia University in New York City in 2024. Kordia — who was not a student at Columbia and was not involved in political student organizing — was first arrested by New York City police during a protest outside the gates of the school in 2024, but the case was later dropped. 

“Though I was not a student, I felt compelled to participate,” she wrote in an oped for USA Today from detention last month. “After all, Israel, with the backing of the United States, has laid waste to Gaza, forcibly displacing my family, killing nearly 200 of my relatives.”

The federal government has said she was arrested for overstaying her student visa. But in DHS’ statement to RNS, the spokesperson referred to her involvement in Palestine solidarity protests.

Her lawyers accused DHS of exploiting “administrative loopholes” to keep her in detention, saying “an immigration judge has twice determined Ms. Kordia to be releasable,” in the statement.

Thirty-two people died in ICE custody in 2025, marking the agency’s deadliest year in more than two decades. 

“ICE disappeared Leqaa into a hospital without any access to her legal counsel and family, subjecting her loved ones to unbearable pain,” said Sadaf Hasan, an attorney at Muslim Advocates, one of the organizations representing Kordia, in a statement. “This lack of transparency is straight from ICE’s playbook: isolate, conceal, and punish whomever it disfavors.”

In recent months, some Texas lawmakers have raised alarms about Kordia’s detention, according to reports from The Dallas Morning News. Over 30 Texas state officials sent a letter in January to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem demanding Kordia’s release, saying her confinement is part of the Trump administration’s “broader crackdown on freedom of expression and its criminalization of peaceful protest.” 

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani also called for Kordia’s release on Tuesday, writing in an X post that she was wrongly detained “for exercising her First Amendment rights in NYC & speaking out against the ongoing genocide in Palestine.”

Over the past year, other people who have protested in support of Palestinian rights have been placed in immigration detention and have faced legal proceedings, including Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Yaakub Ira Vijandre and Badar Khan Suri. On Tuesday, an immigration judge dropped the case against Öztürk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University, preventing her from being deported nearly a year after masked federal agents in plainclothes arrested her. 

Naz Ahmad, co-director of a legal clinic at The City University of New York School of Law, who is helping represent Kordia in her federal lawsuit, said in a statement that ICE continues “to punish her for her advocacy for Palestine and Palestinians.”

Kordia lived in Gaza for a few years as a child and grew up largely in the West Bank. She was separated from her mother for 20 years after her parent’s divorce because of Israel’s restrictions of movement for Palestinians, Kordia and her family have said. 

Laila El-Haddad, a Palestinian writer and advocate, said Kordia’s experience under Israeli occupation compelled her to protest for Palestinians back in 2024. When El-Haddad visited Kordia in detention in late December, she told RNS that Kordia looked pale and exhausted and complained about poor food and living conditions. Still, El-Haddad said Kordia showed simultaneous softness and strength. 

“She’s a very positive person,” El-Haddad said. “She’s continuously saying, ‘Thank God I’m doing well, being here, if anything, (it) has increased my faith and has increased my resolve to defend the rights of all human beings, not just Palestinians.’”