Zohran Mamdani on His Family’s Experience With Immigration Court and His Plans for ICE in NYC

Zohran Mamdani has felt the fear that stalks the halls of New York City’s immigration courts in the Trump era. 

The mayor-elect found himself waiting nervously on a Manhattan sidewalk when his father, who is Indian-Ugandan, was called in for his citizenship interview. 

“I was there earlier this year outside of 26 Federal Plaza,” Mamdani said in an interview with TPM. “I spent four hours waiting not knowing what was going to happen.” 

During President Donald Trump’s second term, these types of legal proceedings have often ended in violent encounters between masked agents from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and immigrants who are seeking to become Americans. The building where Mamdani’s father had his interview has been ground zero for this phenomenon. 

”I was lucky, unlike many New Yorkers, in that my father came down and out of 26 Federal Plaza.” 

As they embraced, Mamdani said, he reflected on how much things have changed as a result of Trump’s mass deportation agenda. 

“I remember hugging him and my mother, and knowing that that is a feeling that too many New Yorkers are being denied because a site of what was, by and large, routine immigration check-ins has instead become the focal point of deportation efforts in this city,” he said.

Over the past month, TPM has chronicled this unprecedented wave of courthouse detentions for our series on mass deportation — and the resistance movement that has risen up to confront it. 

In an exclusive conversation on Sunday night, Mamdani, who takes office on Jan. 1, shared details of his recent Oval Office sit-down with the president. Mamdani also talked with us about his family’s experience with the notorious immigration courts, his own work to support immigrants, and his vow to ensure New York remains a “sanctuary city” despite threats from Trump. 

During those fraught hours outside 26 Federal Plaza, as he waited for his father to emerge, Mamdani said he stood outside and was in touch “on the phone with a lawyer ready to file pro se if needed.” That strategy, where immigrants, equipped with advice and assistance, represent themselves in court, has been facilitated by the networks of legal clinics that are a major part of the movement fighting back against ICE in New York and around the country. And Mamdani was already familiar with these tactics from his own work providing similar services to immigrants as a state assemblyman in Queens, one of the most diverse counties in the nation. 

“This began when an uncle in the neighborhood — no relation … I knew him from a mosque in the neighborhood — he called me and he said that there were a number of, as he described it, West African brothers who were asylum seekers, and had nowhere to go,” Mamdani recounted. “They’d gathered in a local community organization … and he asked me to come and see them.”

That meeting resulted in a “partnership” between Mamdani’s state Assembly office and the community organization, he said.

“Now our office continues to hold weekly asylum clinics,” Mamdani said, adding that these events have “served over a thousand undocumented New Yorkers.” 

Along with working on asylum cases, Mamdani’s staff has helped connect eligible immigrants to city services like IDNYC and Fair Fares. They’ve also assisted them with other immigration issues. For example, according to his transition staff, Mamdani’s office has secured three U visas, which are set aside for crime victims. Mamdani’s team said they conduct detailed screenings  for the immigrants who have come to his office to determine whether they qualify for additional support including housing assistance and city vouchers that are available to certain tenants. 

“I have to just give an immense amount of credit to my team that has done that work and developed those relationships and built a trust with a number of undocumented New Yorkers, for whom government has only ever been something to be feared as opposed to something to be engaged with, let alone to be trusted,” Mamdani said. 

Earlier this month, Mamdani sat and spoke to a long line of New Yorkers at the Museum of the Moving Image for 12 straight hours. It was an homage to a famed performance art piece that Mamdani dubbed “The Mayor Is Listening.” Some of the participants in the marathon session were undocumented immigrants. Due to the risk of deportation and detention, cameras were shut off for those conversations. The only record came on a white notepad that Mamdani carried with him as we talked one week later.

“These are the notes that I actually took,” Mamdani said as he pulled out the pad and read off the page. “One of them came with her parents, both of whom only spoke Spanish, and she told me about the fact that they were rent stabilized tenants, that they had unlivable conditions.”

According to Mamdani, when the family asked for required repairs, their landlord’s contractor refused to do the work and instead posted signs for ICE in the lobby. Mamdani said this served as a threat that made it “very clear to the family that they would seek to exploit their immigration status as a way to silence them for their requests for basic tenant protections.”

“What this story and the others I heard reminded me of is that immigrant New Yorkers, undocumented New Yorkers, are not simply living the challenges pertaining to their status,” Mamdani said. “They are also living the challenges as New Yorkers. They’re living both the affordability crisis and a crisis of dignity on the question of people’s immigration status.”

A focus on the rising cost of living in New York was the centerpiece of Mamdani’s upstart campaign. In City Hall, he wants to ensure this issue is linked with immigration by having “a deputy mayor for economic justice within whose portfolio is the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection and the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs.” 

Mamdani also made “Immigrant Justice” one of the focuses of his transition team after winning the election last month. His committee on the issue includes advocates who work with organizations that have been involved in the efforts to support migrants in the city’s courts. 

Of course, immigration policy is federal, which means Mamdani’s ability to address this issue is inherently limited. And, as Mamdani’s surprise victory turned him into one of the most nationally prominent figures of the left, Trump fixated on him. The president branded Mamdani a “Communist” and vowed to withhold government funding if he was elected. 

This ominous rhetoric, specifically aimed at Mamdani, built onTrump’s broader efforts to punish so-called “sanctuary cities” like New York, which have local laws that limit their cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Trump’s comments also came along with a promise from Trump’s border czar that New York would be targeted with the deployments of federal troops and officers that Trump has sent elsewhere to enforce his deportation agenda.

In conversations with TPM over the past few months, advocates and immigrants expressed optimism about Mamdani’s platform along with concerns that his arrival could provoke retribution from Trump. However, the president’s posture towards Mamdani seemed to undergo a stunning reversal when the pair met in the Oval Office last month. Trump called it a “great meeting,” saying they had “no difference in anything.” He also expressed the wish that Mamdani would be, “hopefully, a really great mayor.”

For his part, Mamdani also offered a positive assessment of their sitdown, but made clear that he was unequivocal about his opposition to increased ICE activity in New York City in the discussion with Trump.

“I thought it was a productive meeting, and what I appreciated about the meeting is that it was one where we sought to find common ground while still being honest about the places where we have real disagreement,” Mamdani said, adding, “It was in that meeting that I told the president that I believe that ICE raids, as we’ve seen them in our city and and elsewhere in the country, are cruel, and inhumane, and do not serve the interest of public safety.”

Mamdani said he also argued against the Trump administration’s contention that the mass deportation push is focused on violent criminals, which is an argument that is not backed up by the data on removals and detentions. Mamdani pointed out that New York’s current sanctuary city policies permit officials to cooperate with ICE and federal law enforcement when it comes to a slew of serious crimes including murder and rape. 

“And I said that the issue we have in our city is not the stated points around murderers and rapists and things of that nature,” Mamdani recounted. “We already have sanctuary city laws on the books, for decades, which allow for city government to coordinate with the federal government when it comes to around 170 serious crimes that someone has been convicted for.” 

Mamdani contrasted this kind of crackdown on criminals with what is happening inside Manhattan’s immigration courts, where immigrants are often detained despite ongoing court proceedings as part of their efforts to obtain legal residency. He also echoed court watchers’ concerns about immigrants avoiding the courts and these legal pathways as a result of the masked against in the halls.  

“The issue, however, as we’ve spoken about with 26 Federal Plaza, is that the crimes that ICE are pursuing in this moment are in fact crimes of simply being present in New York City. And that is why so many immigrants are not even showing up anymore for their immigration check-ins,” Mamdani said. “They do not know if they can trust that check-in any longer or if it’s simply a pretext to detain and deport.”

In other interviews, Mamdani has vowed he would prevent ICE from breaking the law in New York City. TPM asked him what that might look like and whether there was any “red line” where he might have to involve the NYPD or other city law enforcement to confront the agency. 

“I think that our sanctuary city policies are policies that we should not only defend, but also ones that we should be proud of. And to me, I see them as something that — we cannot flinch when it comes to our sanctuary city policies,” Mamdani said. “These are policies that state, very clearly: ICE agents cannot enter into city properties without a judicial warrant signed by a judge. They cannot ever enter into properties of city contractors without a judicial warrant signed by a judge.” 

Proponents of sanctuary city policies say they improve safety by making migrants willing to work with the police and ensuring they have access to vital services.

“These are policies that allow for undocumented New Yorkers to come out of the shadows and into the city that is theirs,” Mamdani said, adding, “You know, they are just as New York as any one of us.” 

Mamdani also criticized his predecessor, Mayor Eric Adams, for failing to adequately uphold the city’s sanctuary status. Adams issued orders and memoranda that expanded ICE access to some city facilities — actions which came as the Trump administration took the extraordinary step of pushing federal prosecutors to drop a corruption case against Adams. Mamdani insisted his commitment to the sanctuary city policies would be far more solid. 

“There have been troubling reports under this current administration of either the lack of adherence to these policies and the violation of them,” said Mamdani. “My job is going to be to make clear to every single city agency and department that these are requirements of what it means for us to be delivering for the people of New York because this is the law. And that approach has been missing.” 

Affordability has unquestionably been Mamdani’s top issue throughout his time in the legislature and his rapid fire ascendance to City Hall. President Trump and others have argued immigrants take jobs from citizens and cast them as a threat to other Americans’ bottom line. But Mamdani doesn’t see the undocumented population contributing to the cost of living crisis. He believes they are also suffering from it as there are those who would “exploit” their status for cheap labor and other abuses. 

“These are New Yorkers, just like you and me … without whom we could not tell the story of the city. More than 3 million New Yorkers are immigrants. This is a city of all of us who live here and what we’ve seen, in fact, is that these crises are tied together,” Mamdani said, adding, “it’s the story of so many workers across the city who are told that they cannot speak up amidst rampant wage theft because their status might be reported. And we have to make clear that in this city we work for the benefit of everyone who lives here and we will serve everyone who lives here.”

He didn’t directly respond to claims that immigrants take jobs and have a negative impact on other workers, though extensive data shows these narratives are false and that the deportation drive is itself causing economic harm. 

Mamdani is relentlessly on message, but for once, he didn’t want to talk in terms of costs and affordability. While he said the case that immigrants make a positive economic contribution “is absolutely there to be made,” his focus is elsewhere on this issue. 

“I don’t even want to get into an economic argument about it, though,” Mamdani said. “We have to begin at a moral level.”