ICE’s Latest Bit of Despicable Trickery May Be Illegal |
ICE’s Latest Bit of Despicable Trickery May Be Illegal
If the federal agents who arrested Columbia student Elaina Aghayeva passed themselves off as local police, city officials need to put a stop to that practice.
On Wednesday morning, Homeland Security agents entered a Columbia University dormitory and detained student Elaina Aghayeva. ICE claimed that the reason for the detention was Aghayeva’s failure to attend some classes ten years ago—an already outrageous notion—but what really captured public attention was the manner in which her arrest was conducted.
In a public statement, Columbia acting President Claire Shipman claimed that “federal agents made misrepresentations to gain entry to the building to search for a ‘missing person.’” Word quickly spread that agents had allegedly represented themselves as NYPD officers to Columbia staff in order to gain access to Aghayeva’s dorm without a warrant signed by a judge, along with the more far-fetched rumor that they had used spoofed NYPD badges.
That ICE agents undertook this fakery seemed to have been confirmed by Manhattan Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal, who tweeted that agents had “impersonated NYPD with fake badges” before backtracking with an update that called this “unconfirmed.” In a separate press release, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries also referenced ICE agents “impersonating NYPD officers.”
The whole story reminded me of an investigation I published almost eight years ago on ICE’s use of so-called ruses and misrepresentations to make arrests, a tactic that was not only long-standing but had been explicitly included in the agency’s Fugitive Operations Handbook. Yet even then,........