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Administrators say agents ‘made misrepresentations’, claimed missing person search to detain woman at school building.
Condemnation has poured in after Columbia University in New York said United States immigration enforcement agents “made misrepresentations” to gain access to one of the school’s residential buildings to detain a student.
A statement from Columbia University’s acting president, Claire Shipman, said federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) entered the building about 6:30am (13:30 GMT) on Thursday.
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“Our understanding at this time is that the federal agents made misrepresentations to gain entry to the building to search for a ‘missing person’,” Shipman said. “We are working to gather more details.”
She added that “all law enforcement agents must have a judicial warrant or judicial subpoena to access non-public areas of the University, including housing, classrooms, and areas requiring [identification badge] swipe access.
“An administrative warrant is not sufficient,” she said, referring to an internal document that the DHS has used to justify searches for undocumented immigrants that are not approved by a judge. Rights groups have called the practice “illegal”.
The Columbia statement did not identify the detained student, but the student newspaper, the Columbia Spectator, said Elie Aghayeval, a neuroscience researcher, had been targeted.
At 12:18 local time (17:00 GMT), New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced he had spoken with President Donald Trump about the situation.
“I shared my concerns about Columbia student Elaina Aghayeva,” Mamdani wrote of his meeting with Trump. “He has just informed me that she will be released imminently.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a DHS agency, confirmed the woman’s identity, Elmina Aghayeva, to several US media outlets but did not immediately respond to an Al Jazeera request for more information.
In a statement to NBC News, the agency said Aghayeva’s student visa had been terminated in 2016 “for failing to attend classes”. The statement added that the “building manager and her roommate let officers into the apartment”.
Protesters began to gather on Thursday on the campus, which was the site of mass pro-Palestine demonstrations in 2024.
Mass deportation drive
In a student group chat, Aghayeva wrote to fellow students early on Thursday: “DHS illegally arrested me. Please help,” according to the Columbia Spectator.
“They are trying to take me away,” she wrote. “Can someone help me.”
The Trump administration has targeted a number of students in its mass deportation drive, which immigration advocates said has relied on increasingly drastic tactics to meet high detention quotas.
Shortly after Trump’s return to office in January 2025, his administration targeted several Columbia students for their pro-Palestine advocacy, including US residents Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi. The Columbia Spectator reported that the targeting of Aghayeva was the first time since Khalil’s March detention that it had detained someone affiliated with Columbia at a property owned by the university.
In June, Columbia University reached an agreement with the Trump administration after it threatened to withhold $1.3bn in funding over the university’s response to pro-Palestine protests and diversity, equity, and inclusion programmes.
Critics said the deal infringed upon academic freedom and tacitly supported the administration’s conflation of pro-Palestine protests with anti-Jewish sentiment. The university had previously come under fire for expelling and suspending students who took part in the protests.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul was among the elected officials condemning immigration agents’ actions on Thursday.
“Let’s be clear about what happened: ICE agents didn’t have the proper warrant, so they lied to gain access to a student’s private residence,” she wrote on X as she urged state lawmakers to pass a law that would “ban ICE from entering sensitive locations like schools and dorms”.
Representative Jerry Nadler, a Democrat, accused ICE of “terrorising our neighbours and ripping students from their homes”.
“We are doing everything in our power to help bring the student home,” he wrote in a post on X.
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