New York City
Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing a firestorm over how his administration handles policing and responds to federal immigration raids after an
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer
shot 28-year-old father Oscar Belgal in front of his 5-year-old child
in Manhattan
on Thursday.
Outraged New Yorkers poured into the streets Thursday night and soon clashed with the New York City Police Department, inflaming a perennial point of tension for the city’s socialist mayor. Mamdani has faced criticism from his left for neglecting to pursue aggressive reforms of the NYPD and distrust from his right for having vowed to rein in the department. Now, as residents recover from the latest in a
string of violent episodes
in President Donald Trump’s war on immigrants, Mamdani is tasked with shielding his city from ICE and controlling his local police.
“We know that ICE is rotten to its core,” Mamdani said Thursday night, standing side-by-side with NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, a holdover from the Adams administration known for pushing to expand the department’s
sweeping
surveillance
apparatus
. While Mamdani has made his disdain for ICE clear, his detractors argue the mayor must do more than deliver harsh words.
Mamdani’s rhetoric marks “a great first step,” said Murad Awawdeh, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition. “But what is the city going to do other than deliver that? What are the actionable ideas that they’re planning? That’s the piece that we need to be pushing more on hearing about, because we’re gonna keep being in the same situation.”
Legally, there isn’t much Mamdani can do to keep federal immigration agents out of the city. Despite the steps he’s taken to
curtail their access to city property
or stop the federal government from illegally accessing New Yorkers’ private data, Trump and the federal agencies sending ICE to New York are the only ones who could actually stop them from coming.
ICE Agent on
… [more]
