On the eve of Zohran Mamdani’s election, an assistant commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs joined a wave of commenters smearing the young Muslim candidate as a terror sympathizer.
“Never forget,” read a meme Erick Salgado posted on his personal Facebook page, the words superimposed over a photo of the Twin Towers exploding on Sept. 11, 2001. To the right of that, the words, “We forgot” were superimposed over Mamdani’s face.
Below that, Salgado, who is paid $120,000 a year to be a liaison to immigrant communities, wrote: “This man must not win with Christian votes,” according to a screenshot of the post shared with THE CITY.
Assistant commissioner of outreach at the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, Erick Salgado posted an Islamophobic image to his Facebook page. Credit: Screengrab via Facebook
Salgado did not return requests for comment this week about the post, which has apparently been deleted.
A source familiar with the situation said MOIA Commissioner Manuel Castro flagged the post for City Hall shortly after the election and recommended that Salgado be fired. He remains employed.
Asked about the remarks, Liz Garcia, a spokesperson for Mayor Eric Adams said they “have been made aware of the situation and are actively investigating the matter.”
“We condemn this social media post by a member of MOIA’s staff,” she wrote. “This type of language undermines our commitment to ensuring every New Yorker is treated with respect and dignity, and we have zero tolerance for hateful rhetoric of any kind.”
Shaina Coronel, a spokesperson for MOIA, said, “Commissioner Castro condemns in the strongest possible terms the offensive and hurtful social media post by a member of MOIA’s staff.”
“There should absolutely be no room for Islamophobia in our city and much less in our city government,” Coronel said. “These kinds of action undermines our commitment to ensure that every New Yorker is treated with respect and dignity, with no exceptions.”
The Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, created in 2001 by a voter referendum, helps set policy for the city’s more than 3 million immigrants.
While the U.S. Census does not track religion, more than 200,000 foreign born residents who live in New York City hail from Muslim-majority nations, according to the latest census estimates.
A spokesperson for Mamdani, who will become the city’s first Muslim mayor when he takes office in January, didn’t respond to a request for comment right away.
The pastor of the Iglesia Jovenes Cristianos church in Brooklyn, Salgado had long espoused anti-LGBTQ views, including organizing a Bronx rally against same-sex marriage in 2011. When he ran a longshot mayoral campaign in 2013, he was endorsed by the National Organization for Marriage, an anti-same-sex marriage group.
Although he claimed to have “evolved” in 2022 when Adams appointed him to MOIA, his selection was widely condemned by LGBT officials and allies at the time.
The Facebook post wasn’t the first time Salgado had posted remarks alluding to Mamdani’s religion. Before Adams dropped out of the race, Salgado urged his Facebook followers to support Adams as “a friend of Christians” and warned that “the enemies of the Church are preparing to elect an Ultra Socialist Mayor with a faith totally opposite to ours.” Those posts still appear on his Facebook feed.
The closing days of the mayoral campaign were marked by claims and smears from Cuomo and his supporters suggesting Mamdani, the Democratic nominee and leading candidate, was somehow a terror sympathizer.
Adams, Salgado’s boss, waded into that territory when he endorsed Cuomo and said he was doing so, weeks after calling the former governor “a snake and a liar” in part because of the threat of “Islamic extremism — not Muslims, let’s not mix this up. But those Islamic extremists that are burning churches in Nigeria, that are destroying communities in Germany.”
Weeks later, Mamdani won the race to replace Adams with more than a million votes — the most of any mayoral candidate since 1969.
Murad Awadeh, CEO of New York Immigration Coalition, who opposed Salgado’s initial appointment back in 2022 for his anti-LGBTQ views, said Salgado should never have had a job in city government to start with.
“As a lame duck mayor, Eric Adams also peddled in Islamophobia, so it’s no surprise that his allies in government are doing the same or feel emboldened enough to go out as far as Erick did,” Awadeh said.
“We look forward to a new era in New York City where every single New Yorker’s culture is supported and celebrated.”
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