Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials arrested a Columbia University student on Thursday, then released her hours later following a request from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to President Donald Trump.
Federal immigration officers arrested Elmina “Ellie” Aghayeva in an early-morning operation Thursday that led to a federal lawsuit and conflicting accounts of how the federal agents identified themselves to gain entry into her university-owned apartment in New York.
The New York City mayor’s office confirmed her release, saying officials asked ICE not to move her from the city so that she could have her day in immigration court.
“ICE cooperated with the request,” city spokesman Sam Raskin said in an email. “Mayor Mamdani then raised the issue directly with the President at the White House, and shortly after their meeting, the President informed him over the phone that Aghayeva would be released.”
After her release, the university and federal officials gave starkly different accounts of the circumstances of her arrest.
Claire Shipman, the school’s acting president, released a video and statement Thursday evening saying officers had misrepresented themselves. She said surveillance cameras showed five federal agents enter the off-campus Columbia residential building where Aghayeva lived shortly after 6 a.m. After making their way to her apartment, they showed pictures of an alleged missing child.
“Once inside the apartment, it became clear they had misrepresented themselves,” Shipman said. “A public safety officer arrived, asked multiple times for a warrant, which was not produced, and asked for time to call his boss, which was not given.
“The agents took our student.”
Shipman called the incident “frightening” and “unacceptable.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said agents from ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit identified themselves verbally and displayed their badges. The department did not directly respond to allegations that the agents had entered student housing under false pretenses. Federal officials said the building manager and her roommate let them into the apartment.
ICE placed Aghayeva in removal proceedings, federal officials added, and released her to await a hearing.
DHS did not respond to a question from The Washington Post about why they reversed course and released her hours after the arrest.
The arrest sent fresh shock waves across a campus that was upended last year when immigration officers arrested Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil at his university-owned apartment building and rushed him to a detention center in Louisiana. He was a legal permanent resident married to a U.S. citizen pregnant with their first child. Khalil, a pro-Palestinian protester detained by DHS in a high-profile crackdown by the Trump administration, was detained for months and missed the child’s birth but was ordered released and is in the midst of legal efforts to avoid deportation.
Lawyers for Aghayeva rushed to file a federal lawsuit saying officers had violated her constitutional right to due process and seeking her release, or at least a bond hearing.
Earlier in the day, a DHS spokesperson said in an email that ICE arrested Aghayeva, a citizen of Azerbaijan, because her student visa was terminated in 2016 under the Obama administration for failing to attend classes. She had no pending appeals or applications seeking to remain in the country, according to DHS.
Aghayeva’s lawsuit says she entered the United States in 2016 on a visa and is an undergraduate student at Columbia’s School of General Studies, pursuing a degree in neuroscience and political science.
Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal wrote on social media that the officers from ICE gained access to her housing by 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.
Aghayeva 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, students at Columbia shared a photo that appears to be her inside a car with the caption, “Dhs illegally arrested me. Please help.”
In her note early Thursday, 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.
Columbia University said Thursday it is increasing the presence of campus police and staff in student housing as a result of the arrest. School officials directed staff to alert campus police if federal officers attempt to enter those areas.
Columbia also scheduled webinars for Thursday and Friday on “Immigration Policy and Understanding the Law,” for students, faculty and staff and said counseling is available.
Dan Diamond, Talia Barrington, Aaron Schaffer, Marianne LeVine and Razzan Nakhlawi contributed to this report.
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