Early hours of February 26, agents from Department of National Security (DHS) arrived at Columbia University’s student housing. According to the school, immigration officials told the campus security staff that they were police officers looking for a missing 5-year-old boy. But once in the building, agents knocked on the bedroom door of Elmina “Ellie” Aghayeva, a student from Azerbaijan. When her roommate opened the door, agents quickly tied up Aghayeva.
At 6:30 a.m., Aghayeva, a social media influencer with more than 100,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram, posted a photo of her feet in the backseat of a car. He said he had been taken by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and he needed help.
of Columbia policy is not to allow federal agents to enter non-public areas of the campus without a court order. Most immigration arrests, however, are based on administrative warrants, which do not require a judge to sign off. So how did ICE get on campus property? Hours after Aghayeva’s detention, as students and faculty protested against DHS, it became clear: ICE had lied. And, as it turns out, that’s (mostly) legal.
According to information from Columbia Spectator, immigration officials who arrested Aghayeva had not identified themselves as federal agents to university security.
This was not at all unusual. Experts who spoke to WIRED say that ICE has long been able to lie and even impersonate other law enforcement agencies. But and more funding, capture biasand little attention more than ever, they worry that ICE could exceed its statutory protections—and mislead the public even more.
In a protest that took place outside the university hours after Aghayeva’s arrest, hundreds of people gathered to express their displeasure with the university and call for Aghayeva’s release.
“If the university would train every single officer to know what to do, we could all be safe,” says Susan Witte, a professor of social work at the Columbia School of Social Work who attended the protest. He told WIRED that some students and faculty have pushed the school to make sure all employees are trained in how to deal with ICE and law enforcement.
But that kind of training doesn’t matter if ICE misrepresents itself. Sebastian Javendpoor, a graduate student who sits on the Arts and Sciences Student Council and attended the protest, says that while the school has told its campus security to only allow federal agents on campus with court warrants, “it doesn’t prevent actions like this where DHS misleads an officer on duty. I would say that DHS agents knew that the public safety officers they wronged were not only allowed to allow public safety officers to engage in combat and they did not have permission to allow public safety officers to engage in combat with they weren’t allowed to do that. access.”
Aghayeva’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment. According to recent posts on her Instagram, she is back to school and also back to posting content.
Columbia’s acting president, Claire Shipman, has said that immigration officials identified themselves as police and that misleading university staff was a “breach of protocol.” DHS disagrees.
“When our brave law enforcement officers are on operations, they clearly identify themselves as law enforcement,” DHS deputy assistant secretary Lauren Bis tells WIRED. “Regarding Elmina Aghayeva, State Security Investigators identified themselves verbally and wore badges around their necks.”
Lies—or “tricks”—like these have long been commonplace. In 1993, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the predecessor of ICE, lured immigrants to an INS district office by telling them they deserved to be shot once for being in the country illegally and would be given a work permit. When an immigrant would come to collect their employment authorization cards, they would be arrested and deported.
