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Indian Express
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Big salary, elite roots — So why does Zohran Mamdani declare just Rs 2 Lakh in net worth?
Despite his upbringing among film royalty, red-carpet premieres, and elite private schools, New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani claims to have less than 1.66 lakh ($2,000) to his name. The 33-year-old Democratic Socialist assemblyman, who recently announced his bid for mayor, made the disclosure in state ethics filings reviewed by the New York Post. This, despite pulling in a 1.09 crore ($131,000) taxpayer-funded salary and being the only child of internationally acclaimed filmmaker Mira Nair and Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani. While Mamdani has long embraced his image as a champion of the working class, even calling himself a 'nepo baby' in interviews, the gap between his declared finances and privileged background has sparked new questions ahead of his mayoral run. According to the Post, Mamdani reported no US-based property, investments, or significant savings but only a retirement fund with less than $2,000 from a 2019 nonprofit job and a sum of up to 4.15 lakh ($5,000) in music royalties from his past life as a rapper, 'Mr. Cardamom.' His only significant asset: four acres of land in Uganda, valued between 1.25 crore to 2.08 crore ($150,000 and $250,000), acquired roughly a decade ago. As per critics, the disclosures don't add up. 'More drama from a guy who grew up with three silver spoons in his mouth,' political strategist Hank Sheinkopf told the Post. 'If anybody believes Mamdani is a poor person, they need to see a psychiatrist.' The son of two global intellectuals, Mamdani grew up in a Columbia University-owned apartment overlooking Riverside Drive, an Ivy League-subsidised property where his father, a tenured professor, continues to live. His mother, Mira Nair, is best known for directing Monsoon Wedding and Disney's Queen of Katwe. The family's former Chelsea condo sold for $1.45 million in 2019, the Post reported. As a child, Mamdani attended the elite Bank Street School, where tuition now exceeds 55 lakh per year ($66,000). He later walked red carpets with his parents and contributed music to his mother's films, including a soundtrack slot on Queen of Katwe. Still, since entering politics, Mamdani has worked hard to distance himself from his privileged roots. He now lives in a rent-stabilised Queens apartment and has leaned into grassroots activism, championing causes like tenant protections, police abolition, and public power. But some say he's blurring the line between authenticity and performance. 'Everything about him feels curated — even the 'eating with hands' video felt like an act,' said Renu Mukherjee of the Manhattan Institute, referring to a resurfaced video where Mamdani awkwardly tries to eat with his hands for the camera. 'He looks like a perpetual theatre kid pretending to be 'Third World.'' His office declined to comment on the Post report or clarify whether he holds any additional assets via family trusts or accounts outside the US Notably, New York's ethics forms don't require disclosure of personal bank accounts or non-US financial holdings, a gap some watchdogs say could allow candidates to obscure wealth. Sheinkopf was blunt: 'This guy's no regular New Yorker. He's about as close to the average person as Nelson Rockefeller was.'
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
ICE agents lacked arrest warrant for Mahmoud Khalil when they detained him
Federal immigration authorities did not have a warrant for the arrest of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil when he was taken into custody in the lobby of his Columbia University-owned apartment building last month, according to new filings Thursday in federal court. Marc Van Der Hout, one of Khalil's lawyers, accused Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents of misleading their client. Court documents show the feds logged in their arrest report that agents told Khalil there was a warrant for his arrest — yet the latest filings suggest no warrant was executed until he was transported down to an ICE office in Lower Manhattan for processing. 'The government's admission is astounding,' Van Der Hout said in a statement, 'and it is completely outrageous that they tried to assert to the immigration judge — and the world — in their initial filing of the arrest report that there was an arrest warrant when there was none.' In response, Van Der Hout called on the immigration court to terminate proceedings. The judge in that case, Jamee E. Comans, ruled earlier this month that Khalil could be forced out of the country as a foreign policy risk. The Trump administration maintains that an immigration arrest without a warrant was not unusual, stating: 'It is the pattern and practice of DHS to fully process a respondent once in custody.' The Department of Homeland Security and ICE, which is under the umbrella of DHS, did not immediately return a request for comment. 'Generally, a warrant of arrest must be obtained,' the court documents read. 'However, an exception to the warrant requirement exists where the immigration officer has reason to believe that the individual is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained.' The filings were made ahead of a deadline this week in Khalil's immigration case in Louisiana, which gave the Trump administration more time to submit evidence on its second ground for deporting Khalil: claims that he made misrepresentations on his green card application. Lawyers for Khalil deny the claims. Separately, the federal judge in Khalil's case in New Jersey — an independent legal action where the activist is challenging the constitutionality of his detention — asked for copies of the filings the following day, on Thursday. Khalil also submitted an application for asylum in the United States, which was sealed to the public, his lawyers said. Amy Greer, another lawyer for Khalil — who he had retained in response to a separate Columbia disciplinary action prior to being detained by the feds — said she was on the phone with Khalil, his wife and an agent on the night of the arrest. 'Those agents repeatedly failed to show us a warrant,' Greer said. 'Today we now know why they never showed Mahmoud that warrant — they didn't have one.' As part of their rationale for a warrantless arrest, the government offered new claims that Khalil refused to cooperate with the federal agents and threatened to 'leave the scene.' The supervisory agent, the court filings said, 'believed there was a flight risk and arrest was necessary.' Khalil's lawyers denied the new allegations: 'No one should take seriously the government's patent lie, which it offers for the first time many weeks after the fact, that somehow Mahmoud was anything other than compliant when ICE agents unlawfully abducted him under cover of darkness,' said Ramzi Kassem, co-director of CLEAR, and another lawyer for Khalil. Khalil continues to be held in an ICE detention facility in Jena, La., where he missed the birth of his first child on Monday after federal authorities denied his request for temporary release. Khalil, 30, was detained by ICE agents on March 8 after returning home to his Columbia-owned apartment from an iftar dinner with his wife, a U.S. citizen from the Midwest. He was living in the U.S. as a lawful permanent resident with a green card. He was set to graduate in May after completing his master's at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs in December. The student played a leading role in last year's campus protests about the rising death toll in Gaza in Israel's war against Hamas and the university's investment ties to Israel, acting as a mediator between Columbia administrators and student protesters. The government has not accused Khalil of committing any crimes. It says that even if Khalil's actions in the U.S. were 'otherwise lawful,' his political beliefs could have unfavorable repercussions for the Trump administration's foreign policy objectives. Khalil was the first international student targeted in the current crackdown, which has seen hundreds detained, including a Russian scientist working on groundbreaking cancer research at Harvard who has been in ICE detention for two months.
Bloomberg
24-04-2025
- Politics
- Bloomberg
NASA Cancels Columbia University Lease for Climate Science Unit
By and Loren Grush Save NASA is canceling the lease of its New York City climate science unit that has occupied the same Columbia University-owned building since the 1960s. The move is a part of President Donald Trump's review of federal leases, a NASA spokesperson said by email.
The Guardian
31-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
The US government's round-up of student protesters is genuinely shocking
The defining feature of American democracy, you could be forgiven for having thought, is that you can say what you think without having to fear that you will be arrested, locked up or deported for it. The United States isn't unique in its commitment to this idea, but this country has taken it unusually seriously. No law has been repudiated as decisively by the US supreme court as the Sedition Act of 1798, which made it a crime to publish false or scandalous criticism of government officials. American newspapers, unlike their counterparts in most other nations, can print governmental secrets without fear that the security services will ransack their newsrooms. The first amendment has been understood to protect a very broad range of political speech, including, importantly, by immigrants. As a consequence of all of this, there are – or there were, until very recently – many things one could say in New York that one couldn't say in Istanbul or Mumbai, or even in Berlin or London. The Trump administration's roundup of students who protested Israel's bombardment of Gaza marks an astonishing, radical break with what one might justifiably think of as the central American idea. Immigration agents force a PhD student into an unmarked van in Somerville, Massachusetts, arrest a recent grad in front of his eight-months-pregnant wife in the lobby of a Columbia University-owned building in New York City, seize a Georgetown University postdoc from his home in Washington DC – all, it seems, for their lawful political speech. These are the kinds of scenes we expect to see in the world's most repressive regimes; it's genuinely shocking to see them unfolding here. Thus far the arrests haven't generated widespread outrage in the United States, perhaps because the students are foreign, or because pro-Palestinian protesters have been vilified by both major political parties, many universities and much of the media. But an administration that imprisons and expels foreign students for their pro-Palestinian advocacy is unlikely to stop with foreign students or, for that matter, with pro-Palestinian advocacy. Trump's student roundup has already progressed from visa holders to legal permanent residents, and administration officials have said they intend to come after naturalized citizens as well. And the argument the administration is advancing to justify the cancellation of students' visas – that the students' advocacy undermines US foreign policy – could as easily be made with respect to those who advocate in support of any other cause the Trump administration happens to disfavor. The arrests of pro-Palestinian students have already caused immense damage to this democracy. It's difficult to convey how profoundly these arrests have transformed American universities in just a few weeks. In a legal complaint filed earlier this week, professors describe a 'climate of fear and repression' on university campuses across the United States, with international faculty and students stepping back from groups that engage in political advocacy, forgoing opportunities to publish their work, scrubbing their webpages of references that immigration authorities might find provocative, and no longer engaging with political topics on social media or even in private texts. (The case was filed by the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association; the Knight First Amendment Institute, which I direct, is counsel.) Many international students and faculty are genuinely terrified that masked government agents might show up on their doorsteps at any moment. All of this is likely to get worse. The arrests of student protesters are just one manifestation of the Trump administration's broader campaign against democratic institutions and freedoms. As students are being disappeared into Ice's detention centers, Trump is speedrunning the rest of the authoritarian playbook – threatening the media, extorting universities, imposing sanctions on lawyers whom the president perceives to be his political enemies, and intimidating judges. If he continues on this path without encountering more resistance than he's encountered thus far, full-fledged authoritarianism is just around the corner. And yet it may be the arrests of protesters that pose the gravest threat to our fast-fading democracy. Protest has been the engine of social change in this country for many decades, and it is difficult to envision any way for Americans to reclaim their democracy now that doesn't involve millions of people taking to the streets. The arrests of student dissidents are a warning to anyone who might be tempted to try it. If we can do this to them, we can do it to you too, and we will. The students are being persecuted for exercising a right that all of us need now more than ever. Come to their defense for this reason, if for no other. Jameel Jaffer is the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and a former deputy legal director of the ACLU
NBC News
19-03-2025
- Politics
- NBC News
Mahmoud Khalil says he was 'targeted' for pro-Palestinian beliefs in letter from ICE facility
Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil says he was "targeted" for advocating for the Palestinian cause in a new letter from the Louisiana detention center where he is being held after his arrest by federal immigration authorities earlier this month. "I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law," Khalil said in the letter dictated over the phone to his family on Monday. The 30-year-old legal U.S. resident, who played a major role in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University last spring, was arrested by federal immigration agents in New York on March 8. He was briefly detained in New Jersey and transferred to a facility in Jena, Louisiana, where he remains. He is an Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent and is married to a U.S. citizen. In the letter, Khalil described himself as a "political prisoner," detailed the facility's sordid conditions, and decried Israel's renewed offensive in the Gaza Strip. "Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn't the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo, and his family an ocean away. It isn't the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing,' he said. "Justice escapes the contours of this nation's immigration facilities." He also described his arrest at his Columbia University-owned residence, recalling how Department of Homeland Security agents refused to provide a warrant and "accosted my wife and me as we returned from dinner." He said he was handcuffed and forced into an unmarked car. "At that moment, my only concern was for Noor's safety," he said in the letter about his wife, who is eight months pregnant. 'I had no idea if she would be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest her for not leaving my side.' Khalil said after his arrest, he was transported to a facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he slept on the ground and was denied a blanket. "My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night," he said. "With January's ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom." DHS has previously said in a statement about Khalil's arrest that he had "led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization." White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt alleged Khalil organized protests that disrupted campus, harassed Jewish American students and distributed pro-Hamas propaganda. A lawyer for Khalil, Samah Sisay, rejected the Trump administration's claim, saying there is no evidence that Khalil provided support of any kind to a terrorist organization. In the letter, Khalil also described his background, noting that he was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria after his family was displaced in the 1948 Nakba. "I spent my youth in proximity to yet distant from my homeland," he said. "But being Palestinian is an experience that transcends borders. I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel's use of administrative detention — imprisonment without trial or charge — to strip Palestinians of their rights … For Palestinians, imprisonment without due process is commonplace." Khalil said he believes his arrest was indicative of "anti-Palestinian racism" demonstrated by "both the Biden and Trump administrations" over "the past 16 months as the U.S. has continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention." "The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent. Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs," Khalil warned. He then urged people to rally together to defend the Palestinian people. "In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all," he said. On Monday, Khalil's legal team filed a preliminary injunction in the federal court in the Southern District of New York asking for his release to return home to his wife. Khalil concluded his letter by saying, "I hope nonetheless to be free to witness the birth of my first-born child."
