A sitting U.S. congressman in Tennessee has sent a formal request to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi that Zohran Mamdani be stripped of his American citizenship and deported. In a saner world, Rep. Andy Ogles would be run out of office at the earliest possible opportunity for abusing his power in the most un-American way imaginable.
President Trump, guided by his zealot aide Stephen Miller, is engaging in a deportation fiesta.
They’ve focused most of their ire on unleashing ICE in U.S. cities like New York, trying to terrorize otherwise law-abiding immigrants who may or may not be undocumented, but it doesn’t stop there. One day, Trump said farmers and others in rural America shouldn’t have their workers rounded up and sent back home; the next day, he’s reversed course.
He’s been deporting people with such carelessness, trolling social media feeds of students here on visas and people who enter the country for signs that they might be unfit — including, crazily, their statements on Israel’s war in Gaza.
It’s out of this context that the idea organically emerges to target a U.S. citizen who just won the Democratic nomination for New York City mayor. Ogles does so on the grounds that Mamdani, in a rap song of all places, praised the leadership of the Holy Land Foundation, men who were convicted in federal court of providing material support to Hamas.
On that grounds, Ogles reasons that Mamdani’s 2018 U.S. citizenship — which he earned after 20 years of living in New York having arrived here when was a 7-year-old boy — should be voided and he be expelled from the country.
“Publicly praising the Foundation’s convicted leadership as ‘my guys’ raises serious concerns about whether Mr. Mamdani held affiliations or sympathies he failed to disclose during the naturalization process,” Ogles wrote.
“While I understand that some may raise First Amendment concerns about taking legal action based on expressive conduct, such as rap lyrics, speech alone does not preclude accountability where it reasonably suggests underlying conduct relevant to eligibility for naturalization,” Ogles said in his letter.
Pretty thin gruel, congressman.
Queens Republican Councilwoman Vickie Paladino expressed similar ideas about Mamdani before the Democratic primary. While Paladino’s nonsense was rightfully ignored, a letter from a member of the House majority to the AG may not be ignored, especially this AG, especially under this president.
Using the political and partisan disagreements with Mamdani as a hammer to twist American immigration law is as wrong as the old days of keeping blacklists of suspected socialists and communists. Maybe that will be next, as Trump is already calling Mamdani a communist.
Like him or dislike him, Zohran Mamdani is a New Yorker and an American. Weren’t Trump supporters the ones who went apoplectic when bars and restaurants refused service to people in MAGA hats? Is a country with a Constitution whose First Amendment protects freedom of speech now supposed to have lower standards of tolerance than a local dive?
It would be really great if Pam Bondi wrote back to Andy Ogles and gave him a lecture on the law and Constitution and that there will be no investigation of Mamdani. But knowing Bondi, that is probably too much to hope for.
