Zohran Mamdani responded to Donald Trump’s threat of arrest if he didn’t let the administration conduct immigration raids by telling the president: “We will not accept this intimidation.”
In a statement on social media, Mamdani also condemned Trump’s false suggestion Tuesday that the first-generation American is in the country “illegally” and that “we’re going to look at everything” related to his citizenship.
“The President of the United States just threatened to have me arrested, stripped of my citizenship, put in a detention camp and deported. Not because I have broken any law but because I will refuse to let ICE terrorize our city,” New York’s Democratic mayoral nominee wrote.
Trump’s statements, he added, “don’t just represent an attack on our democracy but an attempt to send a message to every New Yorker who refuses to hide in the shadows: if you speak up, they will come for you.”
“We will not accept this intimidation,” he stressed.
Trump’s comment Tuesday wasn’t the first time he has used threatening language toward the New York state lawmaker. During a Fox News interview Sunday, Trump said that if Mamdani were to become mayor, he is “going to have to do the right thing, or they’re not getting any money.”
Earlier this year, the administration let Mayor Eric Adams off the hook on corruption charges in return for Adams allowing immigration raids.
Moments after threatening to look into Mamdani’s immigration history, Trump said that Adams is a “very good person” who he “helped out a little bit.”
Adams will be running for re-election in November as an independent. On Tuesday, Mamdani officially clinched the Democratic nomination when he beat former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who reportedly plans on running on a third party line.
Before and after last week’s first round of voting in the primary showed him to have a commanding lead, Mamdani faced attacks from Republicans demanding his deportation.
Pro-Trump Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN), smearing Mamdani, a Muslim, as “little muhammad,” cited lyrics to an eight-year-old rap song as cause for his removal from the country.
Mamdani, who was born in Uganda and moved to New York at age 7, became a naturalized citizen in 2018. Two years later, he was elected to the New York State Assembly, where he has described himself as a Democratic socialist.
That term got all the usual suspects on the right upset. To Trump and other ring-wing figures, it makes him a “communist.”
Rudy Giuliani, New York’s mayor from 1994 to 2001, even labeled Mamdani “an enemy of America.”
