WASHINGTON — On Sunday, Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City, posted a video to Instagram that was truly unprecedented. The video is not a speech so much as a civics class that wandered in off Queens Boulevard and sat down in a TikTok studio.
Mamdani holds up a piece of paper and tells the city what a judicial warrant looks like — one signed by a judge, not some bullshit form ICE printed in the office.
“ICE cannot enter into private spaces like your home, school, or private area of your workplace without a judicial warrant signed by a judge,” he says. “If ICE does not have a judicial warrant…you have the right to say, ‘I do not consent to entry’ and the right to keep your door closed.”
He holds up another form, the kind the agents like to wave around when they’re in the hallway pretending the Constitution stayed downstairs.
“Sometimes ICE will show you paperwork that looks like this and tell you that they have the right to arrest you,” he says. “That is false. ICE is legally allowed to lie to you, but you have the right to remain silent.”
Legally allowed to lie. That’s the part that made half of Instagram stop mid-scroll. People were replaying that line in the comments: “I think a lot of people need to hear that line ‘ice is legally allowed to lie to you.’”
He goes on: if you’re being detained, keep asking “Am I free to go?” until you get an answer. You can film ICE “as long as you do not interfere with an arrest.” Stay calm. Don’t run, don’t swing, don’t turn a federal problem into a criminal case with your name on it.
Then he gets to the part that sounds like a dare and a promise both:
“New Yorkers have a constitutional right to protest, and when I’m mayor, we will protect that right. New York will always welcome immigrants, and I will fight each and every day to protect, support and celebrate our immigrant brothers and sisters.”
The thing goes up on Instagram and X, racks up hundreds of thousands of views and a forest of comments — “now THIS is my mayor”; “America’s mayor”; “NYPD should not be assisting ICE” — and, inevitably, a different chorus someplace else: he’s teaching illegal immigrants how to evade the law.
It is, in other words, a normal day in New York, where a patriotic resident’s know-your-rights seminar is a mediocre whiner’s constitutional crisis.
The feds begin to whine
Out past the cameras, you can hear the professionals tut-tutting. A retired ICE agent explains to a reporter that no mayor can actually “stop the federal government from doing what they’re charged with doing; it’s just not going to happen.”
Conservative outlets line up the usual adjectives: “illegal immigrants,” “thwart,” “evade,” “stand up to feds.” They describe the same flip chart and the same cracked phone and somehow come away with a picture of a city under siege, not one educating itself.
There are limits on the mayor’s power. Even Mamdani’s friends, the ones with law degrees instead of windbreakers, will tell you that. Immigration enforcement is federal; 26 Federal Plaza is not a city agency. If ICE wants to sit outside the immigration courts and grab somebody on the sidewalk after a hearing, no New York City mayor can order them home.
What a mayor can do is less dramatic and more annoying to the people with badges:
He can tell the NYPD that they are not to act as unpaid backup for civil immigration raids.
He can tell the Department of Correction that an ICE “detainer” is just a piece of paper unless a judge is attached.
He can make sure city employees know that they do not have to open the door when a federal agent with the wrong warrant comes calling.
That’s what this video is under the the social media varnish: a set of instructions for the people who live in basements, dorm rooms, shared attics, and two-bedroom apartments split four ways, so they know how far the “rogue agency” can actually push its luck.
It is also a warning shot aimed uptown, at One Police Plaza. Because while Mamdani has spent the fall walking back a 2020 tweet where he called the NYPD itself “a rogue agency” and “a major threat to public safety,” he has been very clear about one thing: when it comes to ICE, he does not want his cops in the room unless a judge drags them there.
City Hall vs. the knock on the door
In the weeks before this video, Mamdani sat in the Oval Office for a surprisingly cordial meeting with Donald Trump, who is once again presiding over a federal deportation machine that treats cities like New York as hostile territory. They talked about affordability, infrastructure, crime. There were handshakes for the cameras. Somewhere under the table, the immigration question sat like a live wire.
A few days later, the Trump administration sent ICE out on another sweep — this time on Canal Street, where the counterfeit handbags share space in the white grievance nightmares of the Department of Homeland Security. The agents showed up. So did the protesters. This is how it goes in New York now: a raid, a crowd, a hashtag, and then a small war of press releases.
The mayor-elect’s answer was not another press release. It was that little class in front of the flip chart. If you squint at it from Washington, it looks like defiance. If you squint at it from a Jackson Heights railroad apartment with three families in it, it looks like survival.
Because at the end of the day, the difference between a federal agent who is “legally allowed to lie to you” and a neighbor who knows enough to say “I do not consent to entry” is the difference between a kid making it to school tomorrow and a suitcase packed in a hurry tonight.
The city for all immigrants
There is a line Mamdani uses in the captions under these videos: “Know your rights. Protect your neighbors. New York is and always will be a city for all immigrants.”
Every mayor says some version of this. They put it on banners, brochures, tourist campaigns. They dust it off for Ellis Island photo ops and State of the City speeches. The difference here is that the sentence comes with instructions:
This is the piece of paper they have to show you.
This is the line you are allowed to say.
This is the question you can ask until your throat gives out.
This is how you hold a phone so it sees what they’re doing.
This is municipal government at the street-level: not in the motorcade, but in the hallway outside the apartment with the chain still on. The lawyers will go on arguing about how far a mayor can push a federal agency and whether “rogue” is an insult or an accurate job description. The commentators will keep turning a video about warrants into a morality play about borders.
Meanwhile, down on Canal Street, the kid behind the counter has already watched the reel twice. His aunt in the back room has it paused on the frame where the mayor-elect holds up the fake warrant and calls it what it is. The print shop around the corner is doing a fast business in flyers that start with the words KNOW YOUR RIGHTS and end with a phone number for a legal clinic.
In a few weeks, Zohran Mamdani will stand on a stage, raise his right hand, and become the first Muslim mayor of New York City. The federal agents will still have the keys to the vans. The city will still have three million immigrants, at least 400,000 of them undocumented.
Rogue agencies come and go in this town. Administrations, too. What tends to stick around are the people who know enough to keep the door closed until somebody shows up with the right piece of paper.
ICE arrested 75,000 people with no criminal records in nine months
Data released December 7 reveals ICE arrested nearly 75,000 people with no criminal records between January 20 and October 15—roughly one-third of approximately 220,000 total apprehensions during the first nine months of the Trump administration.
