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.
FILE - An NYPD cruiser sits at the intersection of a Midtown street closed due to construction, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Heather Khalifa, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — Reviving a campaign pledge, President Donald Trump wants a one-year, 10% cap on credit card interest rates, a move that could save Americans tens of billions of dollars but drew immediate opposition from an industry that has been in his corner.
Trump was not clear in his social media post Friday night whether a cap might take effect through executive action or legislation, though one Republican senator said he had spoken with the president and would work on a bill with his “full support.” Trump said he hoped it would be in place Jan. 20, one year after he took office.
Strong opposition is certain from Wall Street in addition to the credit card companies, which donated heavily to his 2024 campaign and have supported Trump's second-term agenda. Banks are making the argument that such a plan would most hurt poor people, at a time of economic concern, by curtailing or eliminating credit lines, driving them to high-cost alternatives like payday loans or pawnshops.
“We will no longer let the American Public be ripped off by Credit Card Companies that are charging Interest Rates of 20 to 30%,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
Researchers who studied Trump’s campaign pledge after it was first announced found that Americans would save roughly $100 billion in interest a year if credit card rates were capped at 10%. The same researchers found that while the credit card industry would take a major hit, it would still be profitable, although credit card rewards and other perks might be scaled back.
About 195 million people in the United States had credit cards in 2024 and were assessed $160 billion in interest charges, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau says. Americans are now carrying more credit card debt than ever, to the tune of about $1.23 trillion, according to figures from the New York Federal Reserve for the third quarter last year.
Further, Americans are paying, on average, between 19.65% and 21.5% in interest on credit cards according to the Federal Reserve and other industry tracking sources. That has come down in the past year as the central bank lowered benchmark rates, but is near the highs since federal regulators started tracking credit card rates in the mid-1990s. That’s significantly higher than a decade ago, when the average credit card interest rate was roughly 12%.
The Republican administration has proved particularly friendly until now to the credit card industry.
Capital One got little resistance from the White House when it finalized its purchase and merger with Discover Financial in early 2025, a deal that created the nation’s largest credit card company. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is largely tasked with going after credit card companies for alleged wrongdoing, has been largely nonfunctional since Trump took office.
In a joint statement, the banking industry was opposed to Trump's proposal.
“If enacted, this cap would only drive consumers toward less regulated, more costly alternatives," the American Bankers Association and allied groups said.
Bank lobbyists have long argued that lowering interest rates on their credit card products would require the banks to lend less to high-risk borrowers. When Congress enacted a cap on the fee that stores pay large banks when customers use a debit card, banks responded by removing all rewards and perks from those cards. Debit card rewards only recently have trickled back into consumers' hands. For example, United Airlines now has a debit card that gives miles with purchases.
The U.S. already places interest rate caps on some financial products and for some demographics. The Military Lending Act makes it illegal to charge active-duty service members more than 36% for any financial product. The national regulator for credit unions has capped interest rates on credit union credit cards at 18%.
Credit card companies earn three streams of revenue from their products: fees charged to merchants, fees charged to customers and the interest charged on balances. The argument from some researchers and left-leaning policymakers is that the banks earn enough revenue from merchants to keep them profitable if interest rates were capped.
"A 10% credit card interest cap would save Americans $100 billion a year without causing massive account closures, as banks claim. That’s because the few large banks that dominate the credit card market are making absolutely massive profits on customers at all income levels," said Brian Shearer, director of competition and regulatory policy at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, who wrote the research on the industry's impact of Trump's proposal last year.
There are some historic examples that interest rate caps do cut off the less creditworthy to financial products because banks are not able to price risk correctly. Arkansas has a strictly enforced interest rate cap of 17% and evidence points to the poor and less creditworthy being cut out of consumer credit markets in the state. Shearer's research showed that an interest rate cap of 10% would likely result in banks lending less to those with credit scores below 600.
The White House did not respond to questions about how the president seeks to cap the rate or whether he has spoken with credit card companies about the idea.
Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., who said he talked with Trump on Friday night, said the effort is meant to “lower costs for American families and to reign in greedy credit card companies who have been ripping off hardworking Americans for too long."
Legislation in both the House and the Senate would do what Trump is seeking.
Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., released a plan in February that would immediately cap interest rates at 10% for five years, hoping to use Trump’s campaign promise to build momentum for their measure.
Hours before Trump's post, Sanders said that the president, rather than working to cap interest rates, had taken steps to deregulate big banks that allowed them to charge much higher credit card fees.
Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., have proposed similar legislation. Ocasio-Cortez is a frequent political target of Trump, while Luna is a close ally of the president.
Seung Min Kim reported from West Palm Beach, Fla.
President Donald Trump arrives on Air Force One at Palm Beach International Airport, Friday, Jan. 9, 2025, in West Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
FILE - Visa and Mastercard credit cards are shown in Buffalo Grove, Ill., Feb. 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh, File)
