Why ICE Is Allowed to Impersonate Law Enforcement
Photograph: Probal Rashid/Getty Images Save this story Save this story 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.
