Mamdani’s Anti-ICE Video Courts Chaos

Not even in Gracie Mansion yet, New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is once again courting controversy with the release of a recent video on federal immigration enforcement operations.

The top-line theme of the video (“know your rights”) sounds reasonable enough. What’s wrong with knowing your rights?

But in context, the video’s message is far more sinister: an endorsement of resistance to the enforcement of duly enacted federal immigration law, as well as tacit encouragement of chaotic, disruptive, and potentially violent clashes between anti-Trump activists and immigration-enforcement authorities.

For starters, Mamdani leads with the promise “to protect the rights” of those whom immigration authorities aimed to detain, as if immigration enforcement constitutes some kind of rights violation. That framing is immediately followed by a call to “stand up to [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] ICE.” That may not constitute an explicit call for obstruction, but it comes off as a wink and a nod, once you understand that the video appeared after ICE agents were physically obstructed by a crowd in downtown New York days earlier—an incident Mamdani referenced as the reason for his video.

The city has already gotten a glimpse of what this activist-driven chaos could look like. Late last month, police arrested at least 18 agitators in downtown Manhattan for disorderly conduct and obstructing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) vehicles in an attempt to disrupt an enforcement operation.

Unsurprisingly, given the Big Apple’s political climate, the anti-ICE rabblerousers were lauded rather than condemned. New York published a glowing profile of them and the nonprofit groups that trained and deployed them. New York attorney general Letitia James offered support for those arrested in a statement on X. Instead of reprimanding the lawbreakers thwarting federal agents, City Comptroller Brad Lander condemned the NYPD’s restoration of order, calling it a violation of New York’s sanctuary city policy.

Apparently, it’s not enough to refuse cooperation with federal immigration enforcement efforts. To be truly moral, according to some progressive leaders, the city must also turn a blind eye toward those actively hindering enforcement efforts. This encourages activists to escalate their tactics—a recipe for disaster.

Other cities have shown us just how out of control anti-ICE clashes can get. In Los Angeles last summer, immigration enforcement operations sparked riots. As I pointed out then, those riots occurred after local officials—namely, L.A. mayor Karen Bass and California governor Gavin Newsom—primed the pump with incendiary statements like those in Mamdani’s video.

In Chicago this fall, ICE agents were nearly overrun by angry protesters. Reports also circulated that a Chicago police executive, presumably at the direction of Mayor Brandon Johnson, ordered local police not to assist the federal agents who had called for help (a claim local officials disputed).

And everyone seems already to have forgotten the September sniper attack on a Dallas ICE field office that targeted ICE officers but killed two detainees and wounded a third.

Since President Trump took office, assaults against ICE agents have spiked by more than 1,150 percent, according to the Department of Homeland Security, which attributed the surge to anti-ICE rhetoric in “sanctuary” jurisdictions. One would expect the next leader of America’s largest city to want to avoid provoking more such violence.

But Mamdani’s video seems calibrated to unleash more violence, more clashes, and more disorder. That is what he invites by framing the deportation of illegal immigrants as violations of rights and the physical obstruction of federal law enforcement officers as constitutionally protected “protest.”

It’s worth remembering that Mamdani, who has previously referred to immigration enforcement actions as kidnappings and manifestations of cruelty, had to be physically restrained by police when border czar Tom Homan visited the state capital.

A word of warning to the New Yorkers inclined to accept Mamdani’s invitation: by all means, know your rights. But know the rights of others, too—especially those of the silent majority of nonactivists who don’t want their city to descend into even more chaos.

Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images