A sitting U.S. congressman in Tennessee has despatched 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 workplace at the earliest attainable alternative for abusing his energy in the most un-American approach conceivable.
President Donald Trump, guided by his zealot aide Stephen Miller, is participating in a deportation fiesta.
They’ve targeted most of their ire on unleashing ICE in U.S. cities like New York, attempting 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 employees rounded up and despatched back home; the next day, he’s reversed course.
He’s been deporting people with such carelessness, trolling social media feeds of college students here on visas and people who enter the nation for indicators that they might be unfit — including, crazily, their statements on Israel’s warfare in Gaza.
It’s out of this context that the concept organically emerges to goal 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 tune of all locations, praised the management of the Holy Land Foundation, males who were convicted in federal court of offering materials support to Hamas.
On that grounds, Ogles causes that Mamdani’s 2018 U.S. citizenship — which he earned after 20 years of dwelling in New York having arrived here when was a 7-year-old boy — should be voided and he be expelled from the nation.
“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 skinny gruel, congressman.
Queens Republican Councilwoman Vickie Paladino expressed related concepts about Mamdani before the Democratic main. While Paladino’s nonsense was rightfully ignored, a letter from a member of the House majority to the AG may not be ignored, particularly this AG, particularly under this president.
Using the political and partisan disagreements with Mamdani as a hammer to twist American immigration law is as fallacious as the previous days of holding 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 eating places refused service to people in MAGA hats? Is a nation with a Constitution whose First Amendment protects freedom of speech now supposed to have decrease requirements of tolerance than a native dive?
It would be actually 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 understanding Bondi, that is most likely too much to hope for.
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