US: Detained student released after Mamdani meets Trump

DW News · Feb 27, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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A foreign student at Columbia University was released just hours after being detained by federal immigration authorities on Thursday and shortly after New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani expressed concerns about her arrest during a meeting with President Donald Trump. Elmina Aghayeva, a neuroscience and politics senior from Azerbaijan, was arrested in Manhattan early on Thursday morning after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents reportedly accessed her apartment under false pretenses. What do we know about Columbia student Aghayeva's arrest? "The agents gained entry by stating they were police searching for a missing child," said Columbia's acting president, Claire Shipman, adding that CCTV cameras had captured the agents in a hallway showing pictures of the alleged child. In a message to her 100,000 followers on Instagram, where she documents her life as an immigrant student, Aghayeva wrote: "DHS [Department of Homeland Security] illegally arrested me. Please help." A DHS spokesperson was cited by the Associated Press news agency as saying 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. But Aghayeva's lawyers said she had entered the United States legally in 2016 and filed a petition at Manhattan Federal Court stating that she was being "wrongly held in detention without justification."Aghayeva arrest: What did Mamdani say to Trump? Meanwhile in Washington, during a meeting with President Trump about New York City housing, Mayor Mamdani reportedly raised the issue of Aghayeva's detention and was later told that she would be released. "In our meeting earlier, I shared my concerns about Columbia student Elmina Aghayeva, who was detained by ICE this morning," he wrote on social media later on Thursday, saying that he had just got off the phone with Trump who "has just informed me that she will be released imminently." DHS confirmed the release shortly after and Aghayeva posed on Instagram: "I just got out a little while ago. I am safe and okay." The rollercoaster series of events marked the latest development in the unlikely relationship between Trump and Mamdani, the young, Muslim, democratic socialist mayor who had previously been labeled a "communist lunatic" and "total nut job" by the Republican president and threatened with deportation.Mamdani has big promises to deliver on as New York mayorTo view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video The meeting in the Oval Office on Thursday was the pair's second face-to-face encounter since Mamdani's landslide election win last year. During their first meeting in November, Mamdani appeared to charm Trump, who cordially declared that Mamdani was "a very rational person" whom he was "going to be helping to make everybody's dream come true: having a strong and very safe New York." Meanwhile on Thursday, Mamdani reportedly also called on Trump to drop cases against several other students currently facing deportation for their roles in pro-Palestinian Columbia campus protests – in which Aghayeva is not known to have been involved.Trump administration seeks to deport Palestinian activistTo view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Edited by: Rana Taha