A Columbia University student was released hours after being detained by federal immigration authorities, shortly after New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani raised concerns about her arrest during a meeting with President Donald Trump.
Elmina Aghayeva, a senior studying neuroscience and politics from Azerbaijan, was arrested in Manhattan early Thursday after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents reportedly gained entry to her apartment under false pretenses. Columbia’s acting president, Claire Shipman, said the agents entered by claiming they were police searching for a missing child, and CCTV footage captured agents in a hallway showing pictures of the alleged child.
Aghayeva posted to her Instagram—where she documents life as an immigrant student—writing, “DHS [Department of Homeland Security] illegally arrested me. Please help.” A DHS spokesperson told the Associated Press that Aghayeva’s student visa had been terminated in 2016 for failing to attend classes, describing her as an “illegal alien” against whom removal proceedings had been launched. Aghayeva’s lawyers countered that she entered the United States legally in 2016 and filed a petition in Manhattan Federal Court saying she was “wrongly held in detention without justification.”
In Washington, Mamdani raised Aghayeva’s detention during a meeting with Trump about New York City housing. Mamdani said he spoke to the president by phone afterward and was told she would be released. DHS confirmed the release, and Aghayeva later posted on Instagram: “I just got out a little while ago. I am safe and okay.”
The incident is the latest episode in the unusual relationship between Trump and Mamdani, the young Muslim, democratic socialist mayor who has previously been dismissed by the president with derogatory labels and threatened with deportation. The Oval Office meeting was their second encounter since Mamdani’s landslide election last year; during their first meeting in November, Trump called Mamdani “a very rational person” and said he would help make New York “strong and very safe.”
Mamdani also reportedly urged Trump to drop cases against several other students facing deportation for their roles in pro-Palestinian protests on Columbia’s campus—cases in which Aghayeva is not known to have been involved.
Edited by: Rana Taha