As my Free Press colleague Niraj Warikoo reported, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recently revealed that it has arrested about 250 foreign students who enrolled in a fake university the agency founded in Farmington Hills, Michigan.
The students hoped admission to the University of Farmington would preserve their eligibility for student visas, allowing them to remain in Michigan, as the Department of Homeland Security’s website assured them it would.
Instead, the United States moved to expel them on grounds that they knew, or at least should have suspected, that the school was bogus.
But wait — it gets weirder.
Turns out ICE was so intent on attracting would-be students to its fake university that it persuaded a commission of academic professionals to give it a fake accreditation.
This program began in 2015, under the Obama administration:
As the Free Press reported earlier, the undercover operation started in 2015, according to federal prosecutors. The fake university was incorporated in the state of Michigan in January 2016, state records show.
In April 2016, in a separate case, federal prosecutors announced that ICE had created a fake university in New Jersey called the University of Northern Jersey. One difference is that in the New Jersey case, federal authorities did not do mass arrests and detentions of the students as they did in January with the University of Farmington.