A Columbia University undergraduate this week was arrested by federal immigration agents who falsely told the superintendent of a university-owned apartment building that they were the police and that they were searching for a missing child.
The student, Ellie Aghayeva, was released after Mayor Zohran Mamdani met with President Trump and asked that her case be dismissed. But the episode has raised questions about whether the agents’ actions were legal and, more generally, what immigration agents are permitted to do on college campuses.
Federal agents do not have any special privileges on campuses. While certain parts of campuses are considered public property, many are considered private. Agents need federal judicial warrants to search private property, meaning a judge would have to be convinced that there was probable cause that a crime was being or had been committed. Illegal immigration, per se, is not a crime; it is a civil violation of the law.
The Homeland Security Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Here’s what you need to know about what happened:
What happened at Columbia University this week?
Shortly after 6 a.m. on Thursday, five federal immigration agents were let into a university-owned apartment building by the building’s superintendent. They gained entry by posing as police officers searching for a missing child. They had no warrant.
They entered Ms. Aghayeva’s apartment holding posters for the fictional missing child. Despite a public security officer’s protest that they had no warrant, they took her.
The university’s president, Claire Shipman, said that the episode was “utterly unacceptable.”
The Homeland Security Department said its officers “verbally identified themselves and wore badges around their necks.” It said it arrested Ms. Aghayeva because her “student visa was terminated in 2016 under the Obama administration for failing to attend classes.”
Do immigration agents need to identify themselves fully?
In 2005, the acting director of ICE, John Torres, issued a memo officially endorsing the use of ruses, including “adopting the guise of another agency.” When doing so, the memo said, immigration agents should contact the local agency in question. Agents have also posed as delivery people or used fake photos to suggest they are involved in a fictional investigation.
It is unclear whether the immigration agents on Thursday identified themselves as New York police officers or merely as “the police.” If they said they were New York officers, it would have required them to contact the N.Y.P.D., which a spokeswoman for the Police Department said they did not do.
But if they said they were the police, they would not have been required to seek permission.
Judges have not weighed in directly on whether such tactics are permissible, or what might cause them to run afoul of the constitution. In a Columbia Law Review article in 2022, Min Kam wrote that two U.S. appeals courts had adopted a rule in which the ruse would be a categorical violation of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.
But that law is not binding in New York, and any challenge to the ruse would have to be evaluated again by a judge.
What are immigration agents permitted to do?
In the past, the law has been understood to be fairly straightforward. Agents would usually need to obtain federal judicial warrants to conduct arrests on private property. Exceptions can be made in what are known as “exigent circumstances” — a legal term that often means a warrantless arrest is necessary, either to prevent a suspect from fleeing or someone else from being harmed.
During the Trump administration, immigration agents have sought to circumvent that requirement in a number of ways.
In May 2025, Todd Lyons, the acting leader of ICE, drafted a memo telling agents that they could enter homes on the basis of an administrative warrant, according to a whistle-blower complaint released last month. Also last month, federal agents were told they had broader power to make warrantless arrests than previously understood.
The first policy is being challenged in court. In January, a group of Latino organizations in the Massachusetts area filed a lawsuit against the Homeland Security Department, writing that Mr. Lyons’s May memo “established an official policy that is unlawful and unconstitutional.”
The federal judiciary is increasingly looking askance at the Trump administration’s immigration practices more generally, with more and more judges accusing the government of willful violations of law.
“The Trump administration is acting as if the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment do not apply to non-U. S. citizens and that is just not true,” said Elora Mukherjee, an immigration lawyer who teaches at Columbia’s law school.
Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in the New York region for The Times. He is focused on political influence and its effect on the rule of law in the area’s federal and state courts.
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