Mamdani Targets Trump Immigration Policies in Independence Day Speech

Mayor Zohran Mamdani dug deep into American history to slam the Trump administration’s immigration policies in a pre-Independence Day speech that focused heavily on the challenges and contributions of new Americans over the past 250 years.Seated at a desk once used by George Washington and surrounded by 10 new citizens, including two women in Muslim headcoverings, the New York mayor leaned on his city’s role as the gateway for generations of arriving immigrants to make his case for a more welcoming and inclusive nation.“Tomorrow our nation marks 250 years since we declared our independence, 250 years of a grand experiment in self-government, an experiment so audacious that some in 1776 doubted that it would last more than a few years, let alone a quarter of a millennium,” Mr. Mamdani said.In a reference to the 1776 Battle of Brooklyn, in which Washington’s army escaped intact after a defeat at the hands of the British, he said, “Independence may have been declared in Philadelphia but it was rescued in New York City.”But more than a lesson in history or an appeal to patriotism, the speech — which appeared aimed as much at a national audience as at his New York City constituents — was an appeal for the acceptance of new Americans of every ethnicity and a barely veiled rebuke of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration.Riding high after seeing several of his progressive allies prevail in recent Democratic Party primaries, Mr. Mamdani listed numerous immigrant groups among those who have struggled to make new lives for themselves in America. Often accused of antisemitism, the Muslim city leader took care to include Jews among the groups he described as oppressed by the rich and powerful.“For generation after generation we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores it has not sent its best. It sent Puritans and Sikhs and Quakers and Muslims and Jewish people who were banished for praying the wrong way, worshipping the wrong gods, angering the wrong people,” he said.“It sent peasants and serfs from slums and shtetls, who were treated as less because they hardly owned clothes, let alone land. It sent immigrants for whom power was something someone else had.”Arguing that the intolerance of the past continues today, Mr. Mamdani said that in the view of the powerful, America “is an arena of supremacy where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal.”“America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes,” he continued. “America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent, or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit. How small they are, how weak. How unoriginal.”The mayor, a democratic socialist whose support for progressive causes has elevated his national profile, also took aim at America’s wealthiest and at the Trump administration’s roundup of illegal immigrants.In America, he said, “We see a nation where children go to sleep hungry while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more. We see monopolies that dominate every industry, and oligarchs who buy elections. We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by our undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans.”Returning to the patriotic theme that infused his speech, Mr. Mamdani argued that dissent — whether by the signers of the Declaration of Independence or by modern-day protesters — is itself a form of patriotism.“Patriotism has never been about pretending our nation is without flaws,” he said in response to those who argue that critics of the government should “love it or leave it.”“Patriotism is every act of righteous dissent,” he said. “It is every march lit under the heavy sun. It is every protest held a decade before its time. It is precisely because we love this nation that we will not leave it.”

Mamdani Targets Trump Immigration Policies in Independence Day Speech

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