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Zohran Mamdani vs. ICE: Will NYPD help agents with immigration enforcement? Here's what Mayor-elect said
Zohran Mamdani has revealed whether or not he will help or cooperate with the ICE in its operations.
NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has made it clear that he will not help or cooperate with the ICE in its operations. Mamdani made history on November 4 by becoming New York City’s first Muslim mayor-elect, and its youngest since 1917.
In a clip from Spectrum News surfacing on X, a reporter can be heard asking Mamdani, “Commissioner Tisch received a heads-up from ICE that that raid would occur on Canal Street. Now apparently she did give the Adams administration a heads-up. If you were in his shoes, how would you have reacted to this? Would you have said, yes NYPD officers do not interfere with ICE, but how would you have acted as mayor?”
Mamdani replied, “What I will continue to do is be someone who will stand up for New Yorkers when Donald Trump is seeking to fulfil his promise to create the single largest deportation force in American history and my NYPD will continue to not be of assistance to ICE whenever they are trying to terrorise New Yorkers across the five boroughs.”
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“I think that it's important to continue a separation between NYPD and ICE and I think it's important to bring an end to a chapter which Eric Adams said on national TV where he opened the door to civil immigration enforcement,” he added.
Mamdani vs. Trump on ICE operations
On Wednesday, November 5, Mamdani warned ICE agents against violating the law. During a speech at Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Queens, he said, “My message to ICE agents and to everyone across this city is that everyone will be held to the same standard of the law. If you violate the law, you must be held accountable. And there is sadly a sense that is growing across this country that certain people are allowed to violate that law, whether they be the president or whether they be the agents themselves.”
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Trump was recently asked if he thinks ICE raids would continue if Mamdani became NYC Mayor. He replied, “'ICE raids? Well, you want to get criminals out. If they're criminals, we want to get them out. Ideally, we wouldn't have to do them because they'll send the criminals out themselves. But that seems to be unlikely. Now we have to get criminals out. You know, millions of people were let into our country from prisons and from mental institutions and drug dealers, a lot of drug dealers and murderers; 11,888 murders, 50% of them committed more than one murder. And we want to get them out. So whether they're in New York or anywhere else, we want to get them out. We've created a great place in Washington. All of you know, you see the difference between what it was now and what it was a year ago under (former President Joe) Biden.”
“It was a, it was a death trap. And now it's a; people walk down the street, they have dinner. The restaurants are booming. Washington, DC is great. I will tell you Memphis is doing really well, too. You hear those reports, companies were going to move out, they're not going to move out anymore. We've done a great job, and we've only been there for four weeks, so we've done a great job with that. But they have killers in New York. We want to get them out if they have murderers, if they have people from jails that they allowed out of their jails in order to save a lot of money. We want them out of here. We want to put them back in their jails, not our jails,” Trump added.
Meanwhile, after Mamdani’s victory, the ICE took to social media to try and recruit police officers to leave the New York Police Department. In an X post, it wrote, “NYPD OFFICERS: Work for a President and a Secretary who support and defend law enforcement — not defund or demonize it.”
