ICE releases Columbia student arrested on campus hours after Mamdani urged Trump to set her free

A Columbia University student arrested by immigration officers inside her campus apartment was released from custody hours after New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani urged President Donald Trump to let her go.

Neuroscience student Ellie Aghayeva was released from federal detention in New York City Thursday afternoon.

“I am safe and okay,” she wrote to her followers on Instagram. “I am so sorry but I am in complete shock over what happened and my phone is blowing up with calls from reporters. I need a little bit of time to process everything. I will come back soon. But please don’t worry. I love you all.”

Department of Homeland Security officers “misrepresented” themselves to enter a residential building to arrest Aghayeva early Thursday morning, according to university officials.

“Dhs illegally arrested me,” she wrote on Instagram with a photograph from the back of a vehicle Thursday morning. “Please help.”

She was arrested at 6:30 a.m., according to Columbia’s acting president Claire Shipman. Agents may have “made misrepresentations to gain entry to the building to search for a ‘missing person,’” Shipman said in a statement.

Her student visa was terminated in 2016, according to a statement from Homeland Security.

The building manager and her roommate allowed officers into the apartment, a spokesperson told The Independent.

Mamdani, who met with the president Thursday afternoon, said he had shared his concerns about her arrest during their meeting at the White House.

During a phone call that afternoon, the president told him she would be “released imminently,” according to the mayor.

Aghayeva, who is originally from Azerbaijan, frequently posts videos about life on campus and study routines on Instagram, where she has more than 106,000 followers. The aspiring social media personality has more than 114,000 followers on TikTok.

School of General Studies Dean Lisa Rosen-Mestch announced the student’s arrest in an email to General Studies students Thursday morning.

She described the arrest as “upsetting and unsettling for our community.”

Thursday’s arrest is not the first immigration enforcement action on Columbia property; graduate student Mahmoud Khalil was arrested in the lobby of his university-owned building last March, igniting a legal battle at the center of the Trump administration’s campaign to arrest and deport international students.

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