Why ICE Is Allowed to Impersonate Law Enforcement

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.

At a protest that formed outside the university in the hours after Aghayeva’s arrest, hundreds of people gathered to express their frustration with the university and call for Aghayeva’s release.

“If the university would actually train every single officer to know what to do, we might all be safer,” says Susan Witte, a professor of social work at Columbia’s School of Social Work who attended the protest. She told WIRED that some students and faculty had pushed the school to ensure that all staff were trained about how to handle ICE and law enforcement.

But that kind of training doesn’t necessarily matter if ICE misrepresents itself. Sebastian Javendpoor, a graduate student who sits on the Arts and Sciences Student Council and attended the protest, says that while the school has told its campus security to only allow federal agents on campus with judicial warrants, “it doesn’t deter acts like this where DHS misleads the officer on duty. I would argue that DHS agents knew that public safety officers were not allowed to let them in with just an administrative warrant and thus misled them to gain access.”

Aghayeva’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment. According to recent posts on her Instagram, she is back at school and also back to posting content.

Columbia’s acting president, Claire Shipman, has said that immigration officers identified themselves as police and that misleading university staff was a “breach of protocol.” DHS disagrees.

“When our heroic law enforcement officers conduct operations, they clearly identify themselves as law enforcement,” DHS deputy assistant secretary Lauren Bis tells WIRED. “Regarding Elmina Aghayeva, the Homeland Security Investigators verbally identified themselves and visibly wore badges around their necks.”

Lies—or “ruses”—like these have long been common. In 1993, Immigration and Naturalization Service, the predecessor to ICE, lured immigrants to an INS district office by telling them they were eligible for a one-time shot at amnesty for being in the country illegally and would be given work authorization. When an immigrant would arrive to collect their employment authorization cards, they’d be arrested and deported.

“Those were all people that the government maintained had final orders of removal,” says Lenni Benson, a professor of immigration and human rights law at New York Law School. The choice of this strategy is due to, in part, the lack of a judicial warrant. Without one, officers are not able to enter into someone’s home without their permission thanks to protections offered by the Fourth Amendment.

In the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks, Benson says the newly formed DHS subjected student visas to increased scrutiny after it was revealed that some of the hijackers had entered the country on student visas. But the arrest of a student at her campus housing, says Benson, doesn’t seem to necessitate a ruse. “Why couldn't they just wait outside the building and wait if they know she lives there? Why did they lie to gain entry?” she says.

In 2006, just three years after ICE was established, the agency circulated a memo titled “Use of Ruses in ICE Enforcement Operations,” written by Marcy Forman, former director for the office of investigations, and John Torres, former acting director of detention and removal operations, that outlined specific situations in which ruses are and aren’t allowed. “One main objective of a ruse is to prevent violators from fleeing and placing themselves, officers, and innocent bystanders in a potentially dangerous situation,” the memo notes. Even so, the memo adds that ICE officers are not allowed to claim to be part of an agency that deals with health or safety issues, like the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, without “Assistant Secretary pre-approval.”

Though many law enforcement agencies use ruses, often in the form of undercover or sting operations, “it sounds like they were not observing any guardrails. They're just looking for the easiest way to get in and arrest someone,” says a former senior DHS official who spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “Law enforcement is supposed to be hard. And there are rules for a reason.”

The former official says that at the time they were with the agency, they participated in policy discussions about how to create rules governing the ways in which agents could use burner and fake accounts to view or interact with people on social media and in what circumstances they would need to identify themselves. “We spent a lot of time and a lot of dollars given to what is and is not appropriate, and if we were doing that just about someone's social media, going into someone's home is much higher stakes,” they say.

In some cases, identifying as “police” is less about fooling people and more about ease of communication. “In general our policy has always been that it's better to say ‘police.’ It is such a generalized term that's recognized by different cultures,” says a former ICE officer who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “We had a whole training back in the day by saying ‘ICE’ or even ‘federal agent’ could be jumbled when enacting an arrest.” The former agent claims that the agency’s attorneys approved of using the term “police” and noted that “even our vest sometimes says ‘Police ICE.’” The former agent says that ruses were largely considered allowable so long as they didn’t violate the rules outlined in the 2006 memo and other similar guidance.

Annie Lai, director of the Immigrant and Racial Justice Solidarity Clinic at the UC Irvine School of Law, says that ruses like those used by ICE for Aghayeva’s arrest deprive people of their ability to consent to being searched. Because most ICE arrests don’t involve a judicial warrant, “they have to gain people's cooperation or permission to do what they want to do.” In such situations, she says, “there’s no real consent there.”

Lai worked with the American Civil Liberties Union to bring a class action lawsuit against ICE for its use of deceptive practices to be able to enter people’s homes in California. As part of the ruling, a district judge ruled that ICE could not identify as local law enforcement and, if wearing vests displaying “police,” would also need to display “ICE” in letters of equal size.