New York Mayor Mamdani criticizes Trump’s immigration policies

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Friday criticized US President Donald Trump's immigration policies without mentioning him by name, stressing that immigration helped build New York City.

"The irony is that the story of America has so often been written by those who were told by others with power and influence and wealth that they were anything but exceptional," said Mamdani, the city's first Muslim, South Asian, and African-born mayor.

"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," said the mayor, whose Indian and Ugandan parents moved to New York City from Kampala, Uganda, when he was just 7 years old.

"It sent Puritans and Sikhs and Quakers and Muslims and Jewish people who were banished for praying the wrong way, worshiping the wrong gods, angering the wrong people."

Mamdani criticized "the powerful," condemning their view, he said, that America "in their view, is an arena of supremacy. 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."

"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," said the mayor.

Trump, who Mamdani did not mention by name, has spearheaded a controversial and aggressive crackdown on immigrants, accusing them of being behind crime waves and gang wars, especially since starting his second term last January.

'CITY OF CONTRADICTIONS WITHIN A NATION OF CONTRADICTIONS'

Mamdani said that as the US approaches its 250th anniversary-this Saturday, US Independence Day-"We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions."

"We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world, one 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," he said.

"Yes, we see America when we spend our tax dollars on bombs and bailouts, when we sell our elections to the highest bidder, yet we see it just as clearly in every American who still believes this country belongs to we, the people."

He said that patriotism was never about "pretending our nation is without flaws," adding: "Patriotism is every act of righteous dissent … It is every protest held a decade before its time. It is precisely because we love this nation that we will not leave it."

The mayor added that the "ideals upon which our nation was built, they are strong enough to endure any authoritarian regime, but only if we reach for them."