Federal officers from the Department of Homeland Security entered Columbia University housing early Thursday morning and detained a student after misrepresenting their identities and their reason for being on campus, according to school and New York City officials.
Claire Shipman, the school’s acting president, informed the campus community of the arrest in a message, saying the officers “made misrepresentations to gain entry to the building to search for a ‘missing person.’”
She said the school is providing legal support for the student.
Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal wrote on social media that the officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement passed themselves off as local police, impersonating New York Police Department officers “with fake badges and a phony missing persons bulletin for a 5 year old girl.”
“They purposefully deceived campus housing/security to gain entry to the student’s apartment,” Hoylman-Sigal wrote. “The level of civil rights violations that took place is staggering.”
The arrest appeared to spark protests on campus, with people holding signs reading “Abolish ICE,” according to video footage on cable news stations.
A DHS spokesperson said in an email that ICE arrested Elmina Aghayeva, from Azerbaijan, whose student visa was terminated in 2016 under the Obama administration for failing to attend classes. The building manager and her roommate let officers into the apartment, according to the statement, and she has no pending appeals or applications with DHS seeking to remain in the country.
The DHS official did not respond to a question from The Washington Post about whether officers had misrepresented themselves.
An attorney for Aghayeva filed a habeas corpus petition in federal court on Thursday in the Southern District of New York challenging her detention, according to public records.
Aghayeva, who is studying neuroscience and political science, according to her LinkedIn page, has more than 100,000 followers on Instagram, where she posts photos and stories of herself studying in the university library and getting ready. On Thursday morning, she posted a photo that appears to be her knees in a car with the caption, “Dhs illegally arrested me. Please help.”
In her note, Shipman warned the campus about the need for federal officers to present a judicial warrant or subpoena — signed by a federal judge — before being allowed access to nonpublic areas of the university, including housing and classrooms. She added that an “administrative warrant is not sufficient.”
Last May, acting ICE director Todd M. Lyons issued a memo that amended long-standing U.S. government policy by authorizing officers to use administrative warrants — approved by senior DHS officials — to enter private residences without permission. At a congressional hearing last week, a former ICE instructor told Democratic lawmakers that he had been told to teach officer recruits about the new policy but not to disclose it publicly.
Some Democrats and legal experts have said the amended policy violates the Fourth Amendment, which protects the public against unreasonable government searches and seizures. The DHS official did not say whether the ICE officers had presented a warrant of any kind while arresting Aghayeva.
Shipman advised the campus community that if law enforcement officers try to get entry to nonpublic areas of the university, to ask them to wait until contacting the school’s public safety officials. She said those officials would then contact the university’s general counsel to decide how to proceed.
“Do not allow them to enter or accept service of a warrant or subpoena,” she wrote.
ICE is rapidly expanding its operations, having hired thousands of new officers after Congress granted the Trump administration $170 billion in new funding for immigrant enforcement last year.
But the arrest of Aghayeva comes amid falling public support for President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. About 58 percent of the public says the administration has gone too far in removing undocumented immigrants, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released last week.
ICE detentions are a particularly sensitive issue on Columbia’s campus. Last year, federal officers entered Mahmoud Khalil’s Columbia-University-owned apartment building and arrested him despite him showing agents his green card. Khalil, the first pro-Palestinian protester detained by DHS in a high-profile crackdown by the Trump administration, is in the midst of legal efforts to avoid deportation.
U.S. District Judge William G. Young of Massachusetts ruled last September that the administration had illegally targeted noncitizen protesters at Columbia and other colleges in violation of their free speech rights under the First Amendment.
Aaron Schaffer, Maria Sacchetti and Razzan Nakhlawi contributed to this report.
The post ICE officers arrest student inside Columbia University housing appeared first on Washington Post.
