Here is how to understand what happened with the ICE fake university
As has been widely reported, U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) set up a fake university to snare foreign students they believed were trying to stay in the country illegally. The fake university, The University of Farmington in Michigan, collected thousands of dollars in tuition from the students but held no actual classes. The students had come into the United States legally under F-1 visas and needed to stay enrolled in school to keep those visas.
ICE recruited hundreds of these students to Farmington and then arrested them for violating the terms of their visas, which mandate that they be enrolled full-time at a federally accredited educational institution while they complete their studies. The tricky part is that it is unclear why the students were enrolling in Farmington instead of a legitimate university.
The federal government says that the sole purpose of the students was to commit immigration fraud. Since the school offered no actual classes, the students must have realized that Farmington was fraudulent. The students say they were entrapped. The university appeared on the Homeland Security website as a legitimate university. And, while Farmington was created under the Obama Administration, the Trump Administration upped the ante by actually paying recruiters to pitch Farmington to students in danger of deportation.
As for the government’s argument that the students should have realized that the university was fake since there were no classes, it turns out that at least some of the students were suspicious and were trying to find out what was going on. But they were given the run around by the Farmington “administration”. But who were the “administrators”? Government agents! Furthermore, even students who were only enrolled at Farmington briefly were still arrested by ICE, and held in detention centers sometimes with violent offenders.
So, the problem isn’t necessarily that ICE set up a fake university. (Although one can wonder whether ICE agents’ time wouldn’t be better spent deporting violent criminals, sex traffickers and drug dealers.) The problem is that they used techniques to recruit and retain students that are, at a minimum, borderline entrapment, and have arrested people whose crime seems to be that they took a touch too long to uncover the fraudulent nature of Farmington University.
Of course, many of the students involved in the sting operation were probably well aware that they were enrolling in a fraudulent school. But most of the students have already agreed to voluntary deportation and have left the country. Despite its elaborate rouse, it does not seem that ICE put much effort into sorting the truly guilty from innocent students caught in ICE’s scheme.
