In the early hours of February 26, agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) arrived at Columbia University student housing. According to the school, the immigration officers told campus safety staff that they were police officers looking for a missing 5-year-old child. But once in the building, agents knocked on the dorm-room door of Elmina “Ellie” Aghayeva, a student from Azerbaijan. When her roommate opened the door, agents quickly detained Aghayeva.
At 6:30 am, Aghayeva, a social media influencer with over 100,000 followers on both TikTok and Instagram, posted an image of her legs in the backseat of a car. She said she had been taken by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and needed help.
Columbia’s policy is to not allow federal agents onto nonpublic areas of the campus without a judicial warrant. Most immigration arrests, however, are based on administrative warrants, which do not require a judge’s sign-off. So how had ICE gotten onto university property? In the hours after Aghayeva’s detention, as students and faculty rallied against DHS, it became clear: ICE had lied. And, as it turns out, that’s (mostly) legal.
According to reporting from the Columbia Spectator, the immigration officers who arrested Aghayeva had not identified themselves as federal agents to campus security guards.
This wasn’t exactly unusual. Experts who spoke to WIRED say that ICE has long been able to lie and even imitate other law enforcement agencies. But with more funding, arrest quotas, and less oversight than ever before, they worry that ICE could overstep its own legal guardrails—and mislead the public even more.
At a protest that formed outside the university in the hours after Aghayeva’s arrest, hundreds of people gathered to express their frustration with the university and call for Aghayeva’s release.
“If the university would actually train every single officer to know what to do, we might all be safer,” says Susan Witte, a professor of social work at Columbia’s School of Social Work who attended the protest. She told WIRED that some students and faculty had pushed the school to ensure that all staff were trained about how to handle ICE and law enforcement.
But that kind of training doesn’t necessarily 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 judicial warrants, “it doesn’t deter acts like this where DHS misleads the officer on duty. I would argue that DHS agents knew that public safety officers were not allowed to let them in with just an administrative warrant and thus misled them to gain access.”
Aghayeva’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment. According to recent posts on her Instagram, she is back at school and also back to posting content.
Columbia’s acting president, Claire Shipman, has said that immigration officers identified themselves as police and that misleading university staff was a “breach of protocol.” DHS disagrees.
“When our heroic law enforcement officers conduct operations, they clearly identify themselves as law enforcement,” DHS deputy assistant secretary Lauren Bis tells WIRED. “Regarding Elmina Aghayeva, the Homeland Security Investigators verbally identified themselves and visibly wore badges around their necks.”
Lies—or “ruses”—like these have long been common. In 1993, Immigration and Naturalization Service, the predecessor to ICE, lured immigrants to an INS district office by telling them they were eligible for a one-time shot at amnesty for being in the country illegally and would be given work authorization. When an immigrant would arrive to collect their employment authorization cards, they’d be arrested and deported.
