‘I Was Terrified’: Zohran Remembers Being Pulled Into a Holding Room at JFK
From exile in Uganda to detention at JFK, a new book shows how America makes immigrants sprint for dignity—and how Mamdani turned that chase into politics.
WASHINGTON — Zohran Mamdani doesn’t start his story with politics. He starts with exile. “I am an Indian-Ugandan New Yorker. It’s the hyphenated immigrant dream.” His grandfather was one of the South Asians driven out of Uganda by Idi Amin in 1972. “What was taken from them was a sense of self, a sense of stability, and a sense of belonging.” The family learned early that home can vanish with a decree, a uniform, a knock on the door.
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Queens was supposed to be different. But after 9/11, a teacher whispered to him that if kids bullied him for being Muslim, he should tell her. That was the promise—quiet protection, whispered, conditional.
By 2008, the script was set. Returning from Uganda, Homeland Security yanked him into a mirrored room with other Muslim men at JFK. Agents asked if he’d been to a terrorist training camp. “I was terrified,” he says.
That is the pulse of Run Zohran Run, a new book by Theodore Hamm published by OR Books in New York. Not a campaign diary. Not another politician’s memoir. A record of a kid chased by history—Uganda, 9/11, ICE at the airport—who decided to run straight into politics anyway.
Here’s the thing: America tells its immigrants to run. Run harder than anyone else. Run for the honor roll, for the job, for the visa, for your life. Stop for a second, and you’ll be reminded under a fluorescent light that you’re still suspect.
Zohran doesn’t sand it down. His politics are forged in the same place as his fear—in the mirrored room, in the eviction notice, in the memory of exile. That’s the contradiction of the immigrant story: you’re told you don’t belong, then you run for office to prove you do.
And in Donald Trump’s America—where immigrants are again being herded into buses, camps, and raids—that contradiction is the point. Zohran’s book isn’t just memoir. It’s warning. His story shows what happens when a government treats you like a threat, and what it looks like to turn that humiliation into resistance.
Zohran is still running. Only now, he’s running at the front of the pack, making the rules. Trump’s deportation machine says don’t stop running. Zohran’s answer is simple: run straight at the bastards and take their power.
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