New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani just issued a blistering takedown of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda.
Mamdani joined calls to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency during ABC’s “The View” on Tuesday. Mamdani, who was sworn into office on Jan. 1, had faced criticism earlier this month after saying that an ICE officer “murdered” 37-year-old Renee Good in Minneapolis.
“I am in support of abolishing ICE, and I’ll tell you why. Because what we see is an entity that has no interest in fulfilling its stated reason to exist. We’re seeing a government agency that is supposed to be enforcing some kind of immigration law, but instead, what it’s doing is terrorizing people, no matter their immigration status, no matter the facts of the law, no matter the facts of the case,” Mamdani said.
“And I’m tired of waking up every day and seeing a new image of someone being dragged out of a car, dragged out of their home, dragged out of their life. What we need to see is humanity, and there is a way to care about immigration in this city and in this country with a sense of humanity. What we’re seeing from ICE is not it, and we have not seen that from them in a long, long time,” he said.
Mamdani also defended his statement condemning the “murder” of Good. Federal officials have claimed that the officer was acting in self-defense when he fatally shot Good, who federal officials claimed was trying to hit the officer with her car. Local officials have disputed that claim, arguing that Good was trying to turn her car away when she was shot.
“I think first, I don’t know how else to describe what we saw in Minnesota. People ask me, why did I say the word murder? I asked them to look at that video and tell me what they would call it. And we are being asked to not believe our own eyes. It’s time to be truthful with people,” Mamdani said.
“It is terrifying to see what’s happening there, and it’s terrifying to see all of this happening in the name of public safety. And I’ve said this directly to the President, that these ICE raids, they’re cruel, they’re inhumane. They do nothing to deliver that public safety,” he added.
Protests have broken out across the country to protest ICE’s tactics to detain and deport people. Some demonstrations have called for the end of ICE, with many denouncing recent actions of ICE officers.
Mamdani’s statement comes about a week after Trump threatened to send federal troops to Minneapolis to quell the ongoing protests by invoking the Insurrection Act. But Trump did not say whether he would be sending the troops to Minneapolis in comments to reporters on Friday.
“It’s been used a lot, and if I needed it, I’d use it. I don’t think there’s any reason right now to use it, but if I needed it, I’d use it. It’s very powerful,” Trump told reporters before boarding Marine One.
Trump has repeatedly threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, a rarely used federal law, to deploy the U.S. military or federalize the National Guard for domestic law enforcement, over the objections of state governors. In 2020, for example, he threatened to use the act to quell protests after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police, and in recent months he threatened to use it for immigration protests.
Presidents have invoked the law more than two dozen times, most recently in 1992 by President George H.W. Bush to end unrest in Los Angeles. In that instance, local authorities asked for the assistance.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.