Why Did ICE Take a Columbia Student?

Yesterday, like every day, I woke up, tried not to look at my phone, and then, a few minutes later, looked at my phone. Amid the normal disorienting din was a message with a link to an Instagram post. “Dhs illegally arrested me,” the post read, over a snapshot of a person’s legs in the back of a car. “Please help.”

The post was by a woman named Ellie Aghayeva, a neuroscience student at Columbia—and also, I saw, scrolling quickly through her Instagram, some sort of life-style influencer. One of her videos (“5:30 AM Columbia Student Morning Routine”) showed her brushing her teeth, stretching, and then getting down to work. I watched another of her videos (“Unrotting My Brain,” sponsored by Audible), wondering if I was rotting my brain or doing my job. We are living in a moment when it’s not unreasonable to worry about masked federal agents barging into your dorm room, or shooting you in the street, or sending you to a foreign torture prison, or arresting you as retribution for an op-ed you once wrote in a student newspaper, or for no reason at all. We also live in a moment when a lot of daily life feels eerily normal, and when any online image might turn out to be a viral marketing ploy, or an A.I. apparition. Was Ellie Aghayeva even real? Was this a prank, an autocratic emergency, or something else?

Ellie Aghayeva was real, and she really had been taken from her Columbia dorm. “This morning at approximately 6:30 a.m., federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security entered a Columbia Residential building and detained a student,” the university’s acting president, Claire Shipman, wrote in a statement. “Our understanding at this time is that the federal agents made misrepresentations to gain entry to the building to search for a ‘missing person.’ ” (I read these words, copied and pasted, as a disappearing Signal message, then went to the Columbia website to confirm that they were authentic.) “I’ve proposed a bill that would ban ICE from entering sensitive locations like schools and dorms,” New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, tweeted. “Let’s get it passed now.” A rally formed outside the campus gates. “It seems real,” a lawyer friend texted me. “Habeas filed.”

The Guardian posted a story; so did the New York Post. Still, no one seemed to know what Aghayeva had done, or what she hadn’t done, or whether this was all some sort of misunderstanding. She didn’t seem to be an activist. Was she Russian? Turkish? D.H.S. put out a statement claiming that she was “an illegal alien from Azerbaijan, whose student visa was terminated in 2016,” and that “the building manager and her roommate let officers into the apartment.”

Given the lightly hallucinatory nature of all this, it seemed fitting that the famously memogenic mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, was in Washington that day, paying a visit to the perennial main character of everyone’s feed, Donald Trump. They met in the Oval Office and talked about increasing New York City’s housing supply. At the end of the meeting, Mamdani handed Trump two printouts: the canonical front page of the Daily News, from 1975, lacing into Gerald Ford (“FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD”), and an imaginary tabloid (“TRUMP TO CITY: LET’S BUILD”). Fake-news flattery as aspirational policy—why not? Mamdani posted about his White House meeting at 3:07 P.M. An hour later, he posted again: “Just got off the phone with President Trump. In our meeting earlier, I shared my concerns about Columbia student Elmina Aghayeva, who was detained by ICE this morning. He has just informed me that she will be released imminently.” I checked Aghayeva’s Instagram. Apparently, she was already out. “I am safe and okay. In an uber otw back home,” she wrote. “I love you all.” The post is still up, still garnering comments (“so proud of you angel”; “wtf”; “Be strong! Sue them!”). As of this writing, she has thousands more followers than she did yesterday.

We still don’t know why Aghayeva was detained, or why she was released, or what, if anything, will happen to her now. Whatever comes next, we will never know whether things would have unfolded differently if she hadn’t posted about her arrest on Instagram, or if her friends and neighbors hadn’t rallied to bring attention to her cause, or if the mayor of her city hadn’t talked to the President on her behalf, or if she had been another person—someone who looked different, or expressed different opinions in public. This is how things are now, which is to say: this is how authoritarianism works in the twenty-first century. Maybe we’re confused because everyone is confused, including the agents of the state; maybe we’re confused because the confusion is part of the point. Aghayeva’s life may go back to normal, and, in some sense, this ten-hour saga may turn out to have been a false alarm. In another sense, though, there’s nothing false about it.

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