AFTER Zohran Mamdani handily won the New York City mayoral election, becoming the city’s first Muslim and first South Asian mayor-elect, Republican detractors in Washington, DC, said they would try to stop him from taking office.
President Donald Trump, who threatened to withhold federal funds to New York City if Mamdani won, lent credence to misleading questions about Mamdani’s citizenship and falsely accused the Ugandan-born 34-year-old of being a communist.
Some Republican lawmakers requested investigations into Mamdani’s naturalisation process and have called for stripping him of his United States citizenship and deporting him, accusing him without evidence of embracing communist and “terrorist” activities.
“If Mamdani lied on his naturalisation documents, he doesn’t get to be a citizen, and he certainly doesn’t get to run for mayor of New York City. A great American city is on the precipice of being run by a communist who has publicly embraced a terroristic ideology,” Representative Andy Ogles from the Republican party said in an October 29 news release, after asking US Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Mamdani.
“The American naturalisation system REQUIRES any alignments with communism or terrorist activities to be disclosed. I’m doubtful he disclosed them. If this is confirmed, put him on the first flight back to Uganda.”
Randy Fine, the Republican representative from Florida, misrepresented Mamdani’s time in the US when he said on October 27 on Newsmax, “The barbarians are no longer at the gate, they’re inside. … And Mamdani, having just moved here eight years ago, is a great example of that, becoming a citizen. Look, it is clear with much of what I have read that he did not meet the definition to gain citizenship.”
PolitiFact found no credible evidence that Mamdani lied on his citizenship application.
Born in Uganda, Mamdani moved to the US in 1998, when he was seven years old, and became a US citizen in 2018. For adults to become US citizens, they generally must have lived continuously in the country as a lawful permanent resident for five years, or three years if married to a US citizen.
Denaturalisation, the process of revoking a person’s citizenship, can be done only by judicial order. It’s been used sparingly, such as for removing Nazis who fled to the US after World War II or people convicted of or associated with “terrorism”.
Immigration law experts said they have seen no evidence to support Ogles and Fine’s assertions about Mamdani’s application.
“Denaturalisation is an extreme, rare remedy that requires the government to prove either illegal procurement or a willful, material lie at a minimum, clear, unequivocal and convincing evidence that the fact would have changed the outcome at the time of naturalisation,” said immigration lawyer Jeremy McKinney. “I’ve seen no credible proof he was ineligible when he took the oath or that any omission was material.”
Ogles and Fine did not respond to PolitiFact’s requests for comment by publication.
In a June letter to Bondi, Ogles asked the Justice Department to pursue denaturalisation proceedings against Mamdani, “on the grounds that he may have procured US citizenship through willful misrepresentation or concealment of material support for terrorism”.
Democratic socialism emerged as an alternative to communism, Harvey Klehr, an Emory University expert on the history of American communism, previously told PolitiFact. Democratic socialists generally “reject the communist hostility to representative democracy, as well as the communist belief in state ownership of the means of production,” Klehr said.