Zohran Mamdani's victory in the New York City mayoral primary has rankled some GOP members to the point where they are now calling for Mamdani to be denaturalized.
On Thursday, Rep. Andy Olges (R-TN) sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi asking whether Mamdani should be denaturalized under federal law for "willful misrepresentation or concealment of material support for terrorism." The letter cites a New York Post article that alleged Mamdani has a relationship with a group convicted of providing support to Hamas.
"While I understand some may raise First Amendment concerns about taking action based on expressive conduct ... speech alone does not preclude accountability when it reasonably suggests underlying conduct relevant to eligibility for naturalization," the letter reads in part.
Several prominent voices posted replies to the letter on social media.
Former MSNBC host Medhi Hasan, the founder of Zeteo, called the letter "sickening."
"Imagine a Democrat calling for the deportation of a Jewish Republican. You can’t. It would never happen," Hasan wrote on Bluesky.
"Will @RepJeffries or @SenSchumer be saying anything about this? Condemning it? Calling for a censure vote of Ogles? Any leadership at all from the Dems against brazen Islamophobia against their own presumptive mayoral candidate?" Hasan added on his X account.
"Ogles is basically captive to Trump [because] he was/is being investigated for the same kind of scheme that got George Santos sentenced to 87 months," national security and civil liberties journalist Marcy Wheeler wrote on Bluesky. "He has nothing to lose."
"The exact reason the Justice Dept has the saying 'where law ends, tyranny begins' on the front of it is because of this," Alejandra Carabello, instructor at Harvard Law Cyberlaw Clinic, wrote on Bluesky. "When the law becomes meaningless, all that is left is tyranny. And yes, citizenship is just a piece of paper in an authoritarian regime where the rule of law has been degraded."
