New York Immigration Coalition Action backs Mamdani for mayor

As President Donald Trump makes threats over his citizenship status, a leading immigrant rights group is backing Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani for mayor. New York Immigration Coalition Action, the political arm of the New York Immigration Coalition, endorsed Mamdani on Thursday, the group exclusively told City & State.

“The moment that we’re witnessing across New York City, New York state and the country is a moment where people are looking for hope,” said New York Immigration Coalition President and CEO Murad Awawdeh, speaking by phone from a demonstration at 26 Federal Plaza. The lower Manhattan building houses immigration courtrooms where Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been detaining people who show up for routine immigration hearings.

Mamdani, himself an immigrant who was born to Indian parents in Uganda, would be the city’s first Muslim and first South Asian mayor. Awawdeh said Mamdani’s affordability platform, including proposals to expand free child care and make public buses free, will improve the lives of immigrant New Yorkers, who make up nearly 40% of the city’s population. 

“It’s not just his immigration platform. Our community is probably one of the highest percentage of riders on New York city buses,” Awawdeh said. “For them, being able to get to work and be able to pick up their kids from school, go shopping, is really dependent on having an efficient mass transit system.” He said he was also impressed by the Mamdani campaign’s sophisticated multilingual approach in the primary that expanded the electorate.

“Zohran calls the population ‘zero prime voters.’ Historically, they’ve been called low-propensity voters: people who don’t vote or haven’t voted in the last several elections, and those are people from our communities,” Awawdeh said. “Being able to hear the message in your native tongue, be it Spanish or Hindi or Bangla or Urdu, really resonated.”

The endorsement comes a couple of days after Trump called Mamdani a “communist” and parroted false right-wing claims that he’s in the country illegally while speaking at a press conference at a migrant detention center in Florida he calls “Alligator Alcatraz.” As ICE aggressively pursues immigrants, New York City dedicated an additional $50 million to immigrant legal services in the recently passed fiscal year 2026 budget.