All posts tagged: Columbia University

Why ICE Is Allowed to Impersonate Law Enforcement

Why ICE Is Allowed to Impersonate Law Enforcement

Published by skeptic

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 …

In planning family and careers, young Sikh American women say balancing act is their own

In planning family and careers, young Sikh American women say balancing act is their own

Published by Sam Flores

(RNS) — The questions that researcher Pavita Singh asked her interview subjects were those any young woman might be pondering: Do you want kids or children? When? With whom?  But the women in Singh’s study — 30 Sikh Americans between 18 to 24 years of age — answered these questions in ways that showed how their plans around having children balance the future of their faith tradition with the rhythms of modern American life. In academic terms, Singh hoped to shed light on how culture shapes women’s “reproductive identity.” But Singh’s research also drew a portrait of a generation at the threshold: young women in their late teens and early 20s holding their faith in one hand and their futures in the other. Eighteen of the young women — 60% — hoped to have children with a spouse, with a third of that group preferring that spouse to be a Sikh, reflecting their desire to keep the faith alive. That desire for cultural and religious continuity emerged as one of the defining threads of the …