How Trump’s ICE Crackdown Dramatically Upended NYC’s Mayoral Election
Zohran Mamdani is making the case that he, not Cuomo, is the right leader to take on the president’s deportation machine.
IF ZOHRAN MAMDANI KNOCKS OFF ANDREW CUOMO in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, he will have Latino voters to thank.
A Marist poll released Wednesday showed that the democratic socialist assemblymember had more than halved Cuomo’s lead from May, when Cuomo led 53 percent to 29 percent. Now Cuomo leads by just 10 points in a simulated final round of ranked-choice voting. The primary is next week.
To understand this shocking turn of affairs, check the crosstabs for the nearly 30 percent of New Yorkers who identify as Hispanic/Latino. Mamdani now leads among that bloc, the Marist poll found, with his support doubling to 41 percent from 20 percent last month. During the same period, Cuomo’s support from Hispanics dropped slightly from 41 percent to 36 percent.
There are several ways to explain this. Mamdani offered one up himself in an interview with The Bulwark on Wednesday: He, not Cuomo, is best suited to take on Trump’s mass deportation regime, especially as ICE ramps up raids in blue cities.
“A disgraced former governor who describes undocumented immigrants as ‘illegals’ is not what we need as a city under attack by an authoritarian,” he said. “He’s not the leader we need to fight against this administration. Ultimately, you want someone who can take on bullies, not who looks just like him.”
Mamdani’s belief that New York’s Latinos want someone to stand up to Trump’s deportation regime is something of a gamble. The community is not monolithic when it comes to illegal immigration. Not so long ago, the emerging wisdom was that caring for undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers—those who came to New York themselves or were shipped there from border states—was draining the city of resources and that the city government was ready to work with Trump on the matter.
But there is also ample history of New York City mayors standing up to Trump on immigration.
In 2017, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio hit back at Trump after an executive order against sanctuary cities. De Blasio went on to try and parlay his opposition to Trump into a presidential campaign—though it was short lived. Even current Mayor Eric Adams initially tried to push back on Trump’s immigration policies. But his posture changed as the migrant crisis in the city swelled, fueled in part by Republican governors busing immigrants to Democratic-led cities like New York.
Mamdani, who hopes to be the city’s first immigrant mayor since the 1970s,1 said the fight for immigrants in New York City is very personal for him as someone who came to America at the age of seven. In our interview, Mamdani, who received his citizenship and was married at City Hall, noted that just a few blocks away, at the immigration court at Federal Plaza, so many immigrant New Yorkers are saying goodbye to their loved ones.
He lauded Comptroller Brad Lander (also a candidate in the Democratic primary), who was arrested after locking arms with an immigrant at the same court on Tuesday.
“What Brad showed is the kind of leadership we need in this moment,” he said. “Leadership that meets this moment, using every tool at our disposal to highlight the horrific cruelty continuing to take place in the five boroughs and across this country. The president has sought to dehumanize immigrants and that requires Democrats such as myself to stand up and showcase the problem with that kind of politics.”
FEW CITIES IN THE COUNTRY have as intricate an immigrant community as New York. There are myriad immigrant groups in the five boroughs. A 2023 report from Adams’s office of immigrant affairs found that 52 percent of undocumented New Yorkers have lived in the United States longer than ten years. It’s not just that a staggering one million New Yorkers live in mixed-status families, but 265,000 of them are children—with 80 percent of those kids being U.S. citizens.
There are also complicated political dynamics that come with that melting pot. Mamdani has run for mayor by leveling sharp criticisms of current immigration enforcement, calling ICE a rogue agency. He’s warned of a slide into authoritarianism and the importance of protecting “a city we love,” including immigrants who come in for regular court check-ins only to be ripped from their families. And after Lander’s arrest, he decried Trump’s “fascist ICE agents.”
“If this is what ICE is willing to do to a comptroller of the city of New York, imagine what they are willing to do to immigrants whose names you don’t even know,” he said.
For the city’s 400,000 undocumented immigrants, Mamdani said, the key is ensuring they are able to have their day in court, which sharply increases the likelihood of them staying with their families. In fact, a 2024 report by Lander’s office found that “providing access to attorneys for all immigrants in New York State facing deportation proceedings would likely result in an additional 53,000 New Yorkers being able to remain in communities across the state.”
The predominant debates during the mayoral campaign have often centered on topics like affordability, housing, public safety, and transportation, in addition to rising instances of antisemitism (as evidenced by the fallout after Mamdani refused to condemn the slogan “Globalize the intifada” on The Bulwark Podcast this past week). In our interview, Mamdani noted that this campaign has had its share of ugly moments, like Cuomo’s super PAC darkening and lengthening his beard in a rejected mailer. And he argued, as he did at a forum organized by Jewish groups, that he would stand up for Jewish New Yorkers.
But immigration has continuously been near the forefront of the conversation, ever more so as ICE began to swoop into courthouses, taking away mothers, husbands, and valued employees; the topic has become central in the primary.
Immigration—or, more specifically, Lander’s arrest—prompted Mamdani and other candidates to rush to the courthouse to back their primary rival. The issue has also been visible in how Mamdani and others have approached Adams.
The embattled New York City mayor skipped the Democratic primary and plans to run as an independent in the fall. But his falling out from the party came largely because he was indicted and faced a five-count case alleging he benefited from bribes and gifts from people with ties to the Turkish government. Adams subsequently began angling for a pardon from Trump, primarily by hinting that he would help the administration deport of New Yorkers. Instead, the Trump administration dropped the case against him.
“I was very concerned about Adams’s mayoralty through 2022, and yet even I was surprised by the scale of corruption the last few years,” Mamdani told me. He added that Adams’s term “continues to diminish the faith New Yorkers have in local government.” The most damning part, he argued, was that Adams won with a failed promise to deliver dignity to a coalition of black and brown city residents.
Mamdani’s candidacy is not built on immigration policy, even if it has become a defining issue at the close of the race. His proposals for a rent freeze, universal child care, and free bus service have energized supporters. But they have also been used against him in Cuomo’s attack ads and in New York Times editorials, which lambasted Mamdani’s agenda as “uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges.” Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul also said she opposed higher taxes on the rich, fearful of losing New Yorkers to Florida. “I don’t want to lose any more people to Palm Beach. We’ve lost enough.”
Mamdani has vigorously defended these proposals as proper for a city facing an affordability crisis, and he has tied that issue to the immigration debate in a city where immigrants and legal permanent residents are twice as likely to live in overcrowded apartments as those who are naturalized or native-born.
“We see that this affordability crisis is pushing New Yorkers out, which is especially true for immigrant New Yorkers,” he told me, adding that many are fleeing to states like Pennsylvania. “Social justice without economic justice is like clapping with one hand.”
Ahh, yes, famous immigrant mayor Abraham Beame, of London! I definitely knew of him and did not have to Google to find out about him. Jokes aside, growing up in Queens, I heard a lot about Koch, Dinkins, and of course, Giuliani. Never really heard about Beame!
An organization should take on recording every single person deported by ICE and their circumstances. It becomes just another awful thing going on that one does not necessarily see. You read, go march and what else? Write letters? What else? A central data base, that can be shared with any organization working with immigrants, and open to all people in the US would be helpful. We need documentation and stories to see what is going.
We so need to stop electing a**holes