NEW YORK (AP) — Police in New York City are investigating whether the department violated policy by sharing a report with federal immigration authorities that included internal records of a Palestinian woman’s arrest at a protest.
The probe follows reporting by The Associated Press on the cooperation between the NYPD and President Donald Trump’s administration, which is seeking to deport Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian resident of New Jersey, as part of its widening crackdown on noncitizens who participated in protests against the war in Gaza.
The report shared by police with the federal government included Kordia’s name, address and birthday, as well as an NYPD officer’s two-sentence summary of her arrest for protesting outside Columbia University last spring.
That charge — a summons for disorderly conduct — was dismissed and the case sealed, meaning it should not have been accessible for law enforcement purposes, according to legal experts.
“How it is that summons information was provided that is associated with a sealed arrest is what we are looking into now,” the city’s police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, said Tuesday in response to the AP’s questions. “This is under internal investigation and review.”
Kordia, a 32-year-old waitress living in Paterson, New Jersey, was detained during a March 13 check-in with immigration officials, then sent to an immigration jail in Texas, where she remains. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced her arrest the following day, citing an expired visa and her role in “pro-Hamas protests.”
The four-page NYPD report on Kordia was generated the same day and is now being used as evidence by the federal government in its bid to deport her.
“We still don’t know how she became the focus of the Department of Homeland Security,” said Arthur Ago, an attorney for Kordia. “If they did get information from the NYPD about a sealed citation that was dismissed in the interest of justice, that would be highly disturbing.”
Under city law, police are generally prohibited from assisting federal authorities in civil immigration enforcement, though there are exceptions for criminal investigation.
Tisch said the department received a request from Homeland Security Investigations, a division of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as part of a criminal investigation into Kordia.
“The member said they were seeking information on this person related to a money laundering investigation, and that is fairly standard for us, so the information was provided,” Tisch said. “That was all done according to procedure.”
Kordia’s attorney said he was not aware of any investigation related to money laundering. He said she was born in Jerusalem, grew up in the West Bank and arrived in New Jersey in 2016 to live with her mother, a U.S. citizen.
In Kordia’s immigration case, the federal government has referenced both her past arrest at Columbia and a $1,000 payment she made to a relative in the West Bank as evidence of potential dangerousness, the attorney said.
“They keep hinting and insinuating some sort of nefarious action by Ms. Kordia in terms of just sending money to family in Palestine,” Ago said. “There’s nothing there. Sending money home to a relative is what immigrants do in this country.”
A DHS spokesperson said Kordia was taken into custody for immigration violations but would not say if she was facing criminal investigation.
In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the New York City Council called the police commissioner’s lack of explanation “troubling.”
“The people of our city should be able to trust that the mayoral administration will comply with local laws and not hand over their information without legal justification for its use by ICE,” the statement continued.