Explaining people’s legal rights could be a constitutional transgression. That’s the message from Department for Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem, who announced this week that DHS, along with the Justice Department will be looking into the actions of New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.
Speaking to Fox News, Noem said Mamdani “could be violating the Constitution” before he even sets foot in Gracie Mansion as mayor. His alleged misdeed? Sharing an 86-second video titled “Know Your Rights When Dealing With ICE.”
The self-proclaimed socialist is rarely so sensible. But credit where it’s due. His video, posted on Sunday, is a simple primer on the importance of due process — an inconvenience for the Trump administration, which has been working to accelerate mass deportations. Yet while the levels of protection may vary, it remains a constitutional right for both citizens and illegal immigrants.
The video explains the dos and don’ts when encountering Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, including examples of legitimate warrants and reminders about the right to remain silent and to protest. Despite Noem’s accusation that Mamdani is “giving advice on how to evade law enforcement and how to get away with breaking the law,” the mayor-elect does the opposite. Following on from last week’s standoff between ICE agents and protesters on Canal Street in the city, Mamdani emphasizes the importance of remaining calm and explicitly tells viewers: “Do not impede their investigation, resist arrest or run.”
Remove the specific references to New York City, and this video’s script could be read out by any politician, in any party, who both worries about state overreach and celebrates the rights granted to people on U.S. soil by the Constitution. Not so long ago, one might imagine a Republican, the type who boasts about supporting personal liberties and the Constitution, narrating this video instead.
Where are those Republicans now?
Trump’s original election promises to deport illegal immigrants who have committed violent crimes — a wholly reasonable position in the minds of most Americans — has proven difficult to fulfill. So DHS compensates by rounding up women working off the books in nail salons and teenagers at immigration court appointments.
Amid this campaign, more than 170 incidents have been documented by ProPublica of U.S. citizens being detained by ICE. The number might be considerably higher, as the government doesn’t keep track. The 170 are just those who have been willing to speak out after their rights were breached.
The stories often read like something out of a war-torn country rather than a republic with an enshrined Bill of Rights. The home of a mother and her daughters raided in the middle of the night, the woman told to change her clothing in front of officers, the girls pushed out of their homes wearing little more than underwear. “We’re citizens. That’s what I kept saying. We’re citizens,” the mother told an NBC affiliate in Oklahoma. “They were very dismissive, very rough, very careless.” Aspiring U.S. Marine Isaias Pena Salcedo now says he’d “rather move countries” after being thrown into an unmarked van and detained for nearly three days, despite providing proof of citizenship. “If that’s how they’re treating me,” he told the LA Public Press, “I don’t even want to know what they are doing to other people.”
Some clues about what is happening to other people: The government is tear-gassing them, leaning on their necks, disappearing them for days at a time. Many Americans have the strong sense that this shouldn’t be happening in the land of the free. Though polling as recent as last month shows a majority of Americans still support the administration’s broader immigration efforts, they also think the tactics being used by ICE have gone too far.
So why is it being left to Mamdani to remind people about their legal protections against the intrusions of an overbearing state?
Republicans will regret ceding the defense of liberty to the socialist left. Mamdani is the same politician who celebrated his victory by declaring “that there is no problem too large for government to solve.” He champions rent control and government-run grocery stores. His ideas are largely plucked from a socialist wish list, one that would greatly reduce individual power while expanding the size of the state.
He may be happy to extol individual rights when they rub up against law enforcement, but don’t expect an earnest defense of the individual when it comes to taxes, the right to bear arms or for people to say what they’d like in America’s most populous city.
A socialist, even a Democratic one, cannot be relied on to protect Americans’ basic freedoms. But Mamdani got this one right. Self-proclaimed lovers of liberty, take note.
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