NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch is defending the NYPD’s cooperation with federal immigration authorities currently detaining a Palestinian woman who participated in protests at Columbia University, arguing New York’s strict sanctuary laws don’t apply.
But advocates for immigrants say that Tisch is dangerously wrong in the case of the woman, 32-year-old Leqaa Kordia, and in effect cooperating with the Trump administration practice of arresting people first and providing justifications later.
The situation is alarming immigrant advocates, who warn it could reveal a massive loophole in the city’s sanctuary laws being actively exploited by the NYPD.
At a press briefing with Mayor Eric Adams on Tuesday, Tisch addressed a question about how the sealed record of Kordia’s arrest last year ended up in the hands of the Department of Homeland Security.
That document was subsequently used by DHS attorneys arguing for her deportation in immigration court, in a development first reported by the Associated Press.
Tisch described the recent handover of Kordia’s NYPD file as part of a “fairly standard” process under which an agent with Homeland Security Investigations in New Jersey requested the record from the NYPD, saying it was for a money laundering investigation.
While New York City’s sanctuary laws forbid cooperation on civil immigration enforcement, in a case like that involves an underlying criminal investigation, the NYPD regularly complies with federal requests, Tisch said.
“When we get that type of request into our real-time crime center from any partners, but also our federal partners, we ask a bunch of information, the name of the person making the request, where they’re assigned, and what the request is related to,” she explained.
“In the case that you are asking about, the member said that they were seeking information on this person related to a money laundering investigation, and that is fairly standard for us, and so the information was provided,” Tisch added.
Up until her detention last month, Kordia, a 32-year-old Palestinian woman from the West Bank, was living with her mother in Paterson, N.J. She was detained by ICE in the days after student activist Mahmoud Khalil, her arrest briefly noted at the time in a Homeland Security press release along with a Columbia student protester, Ranjani Srinivasan, who left the country after her visa was revoked.
While Kordia was never a student at Columbia, she joined dozens of others outside the university campus on the night of April 30, 2024, to mourn dozens of relatives killed in Israel’s war in Gaza and to voice support for Palestinian human rights, her attorneys said. She was arrested as the NYPD cleared the area around campus and the remaining encampment, in a case that the department dropped in a matter of weeks.
Attorneys for Kordia, who has never been charged with money laundering or any other crime, say the circumstances of her arrest suggest federal authorities were looking for any excuse to justify her arrest. They note that the NYPD arrest record was prepared for the federal agents on March 14 — a day after Kordia had already been detained by ICE.
“The allegation comes as a complete surprise, is entirely unfounded, and we categorically deny it,” said Arthur Ago, with the Southern Poverty Law Center, who is one of a team of attorneys representing Kordia. “Ms. Kordia has never engaged in money laundering and any insinuation otherwise is false, unsupported by any facts or evidence, and we are prepared to fight this allegation in court.”
Meghna Philip, the special litigation attorney for the criminal defense practice of the Legal Aid Society, called the situation troubling, arguing the NYPD and other city agencies are obligated to take care that information shared with federal agencies isn’t subsequently used for civil immigration enforcement.
The situation “suggests a total lack of transparency and potential for wide-scale violations of the sanctuary laws by the NYPD,” Philip said. “The burden is on the NYPD to comply with New York’s laws.”
The NYPD didn’t respond to a request for comment from THE CITY.
Tisch did say the department had launched an internal investigation into one aspect of the transaction: why Kordia’s arrest in the dropped case, which was sealed under state law, had been shared with federal authorities.
The illegal sharing of sealed records by the NYPD — whether to the media, federal agencies, or other parties — is commonplace, advocates say.
The Bronx Defenders sued over the issue and secured a preliminary injunction in 2021 that is supposed to bar the NYPD from accessing sealed records.
But as litigation continues in that case, virtually any police officer has access to sealed arrest records in any number of internal NYPD databases, noted Anne Venhuizen, a senior staff attorney at The Bronx Defenders.
“This is the latest example of how their complete disregard for the sealing statute is weaponized both by themselves and by third parties,” she said.
DHS also obtained information about Srinivasan’s arrest, which happened the same night as Kordia’s. But Srinivasan left the country before DHS had a chance to present evidence to a court to argue for her deportation and it remains unclear how the department obtained that information.
Followed and Detained
Court filings shared by her attorneys at Southern Poverty Law Center reveal more about Kordia’s nearly two months in an ICE detention center in Texas.
She hasn’t had access to halal meals and has lost nearly 50 pounds, according to her lawyers. She has been sleeping on a thin mattress on the concrete floor of the overcrowded detention center. She developed a skin rash so bad it bled and was offered only Vaseline when she sought medical attention, according to the court papers.
In the April 30 writ of habeas corpus seeking her release from detention, her attorneys describe how Kordia initially had a student visa but moved to have it terminated, after she mistakenly thought she had secured legal status after being approved for a family-based visa petition through her mother. She only learned her visa status had lapsed when she was detained by ICE.
In an eight-day span ahead of her detention, Kordia’s attorneys said, she was trailed by federal agents, similar to the targeting described by Columbia student Yunseo Chung.
“HSI agents spoke with multiple people associated with Ms. Kordia, including her mother, uncle, a clothing store owner, and tenants of an apartment she briefly rented,” the court filing reads.
They subpoenaed records from MoneyGram, established a trace on her WhatsApp messaging account and requested records from the NYPD.
Puzzled and worried, Kordia hired a lawyer and set up an appointment to visit ICE’s Newark Field Office where she was taken into custody on March 13. She was transferred to an immigration detention center more than a thousand miles away in Texas the same day.
“There is still no evidence that agents found any indication of ‘national security violations,’” her attorneys wrote. “Instead, this in-depth investigation only revealed a single wire transfer from February 2022 in which Ms. Kordia sent $1,000 to a family member still living in Palestine.”
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