ICE Arrest on Campus of Columbia University

I'm currently working on an article focused on international students and universities in the time of Trump 2.0. One thing I've been looking at is the long-standing history of restraining ICE enforcement actions at "schools." If you didn't know, that policy goes back to the Clinton Administration in 1993, though the policy stood under Bush, Obama, Trump 1.0, and Biden. And, for the record, John Morton clarified, in 2011, that colleges and universities counted as "schools".

Then, of course, we have Trump 2.0. On the very first day of Trump's second term, the acting secretary for DHS rescinded this decades-long policy restraining immigration enforcement activities on college and university campuses. This was, soon after, followed by a memo from the acting director of ICE wherein he declined to issue “bright line rules regarding where immigration laws are permitted to be exercised” and instead emphasized is “great faith in the judgment of our law enforcement personnel” to make “case-by-case determinations regarding whether, where, and when to conduct an immigration enforcement action.”

So it's with great interest that I'm reading WaPo's coverage of the ICE action that took place on the grounds of Columbia University this morning--inside one of the university's housing units. According to reports, ICE agents entered university housing, passed themselves off as NYPD, and said they were looking for a missing child. They then proceeded to arrest a student, Elmina Aghayeva, from Azerbaijan.

Wow. Guess I have a new crimmigraiton real-o-thetical for the fall.