The Midnight Oath: Zohran Mamdani's Road From Kampala to New York City Hall

Immigrant Trailblazers is a series profiling immigrants who have left a lasting mark on the United States.

Just after midnight on January 1, 2026, beneath the streets of lower Manhattan, a private ceremony took place in the old City Hall subway station: a decommissioned stop with arched ceilings, one of the city’s original stations. New York Attorney General Letitia James read out the oath. Zohran Mamdani, 34, placed his hand on a Quran. According to the Associated Press, he used two: one that had belonged to his grandfather, and a pocket-sized copy from the late 18th or early 19th century held by the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center.

His speech was short. He called the moment “the honor and the privilege of a lifetime,” and he called the station a testament to the importance of public transit to the city. Then he closed with “Thank you all so much, now I will see you later.”

He was the first Muslim to lead New York City, the first of South Asian descent and the first born in Africa. He had become a U.S. citizen only in 2018. Ten months later, he has delivered some promises, retreated from others, and is still finding out how much a mayor can actually change. This week voters approved all five charter changes he put on the ballot, and Democrats, including candidates he backed, won big across the state and the country. The question now is what he does with that.

Kampala, Cape Town, Queens

Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda, on October 18, 1991. His mother is the filmmaker Mira Nair; his father, Mahmood Mamdani, is an anthropology professor at Columbia University. Both parents are of Indian descent. Around 1996, the family moved to Cape Town, where his father took a post at the University of Cape Town, according to the Cape Argus. Recalling that childhood, he has said that “what you remember as a playdate was you being at some rally or some march.”

He moved to New York at 7. He went to the Bronx High School of Science, then graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine in 2014 with a degree in Africana studies. At Bowdoin he co-founded a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter. He was naturalized in 2018, shortly after college.

For a while, he wanted to be a rapper. He performed as Young Cardamom, later Mr. Cardamom, and during his first run for office he described himself as a “B-list rapper.” His day job pointed in another direction.

The foreclosure counselor

After college, Mamdani worked as a foreclosure prevention counselor in Queens, helping residents avoid eviction. He has said that job is what pushed him into politics. In 2020, running as a democratic socialist, he unseated a longtime Democratic incumbent in an Assembly district covering Astoria. His most notable law in Albany was a pilot program that made a handful of city bus routes free for a year.

In October 2021, he joined a hunger strike outside City Hall with more than a dozen yellow-cab drivers, most of them immigrants, who were buried in debt from taxi medallions. “The average driver is over half a million in debt for a taxi medallion they cannot even use to make a living wage,” he said at the time, and dedicated days of the strike to drivers who had died by suicide.

Few people outside Queens noticed. Four years later, the whole country would.

The upset, and the backlash

Mamdani ran for mayor in 2025 on a short list of promises: a rent freeze for stabilized apartments, free buses, free child care and new affordable housing, paid for in part by higher taxes on the wealthy. In the June Democratic primary he beat former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the presumed favorite, by about 13 points.

The attacks were immediate. Cuomo and others called him “woefully unprepared.” Opponents labeled his criticism of Israel antisemitic. His description of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a “genocide,” and his refusal to condemn the chant “globalize the intifada,” drew sharp criticism from Jewish groups. In a podcast interview he said he was “less comfortable with the idea of banning the use of certain words.” In July he shifted, saying he would discourage the phrase. Cuomo called him “a fraud” for changing his position. He also apologized for calling the NYPD a “rogue agency” in 2020.

Some attacks went at his immigrant status itself. Rep. Andy Ogles, a Tennessee Republican, asked the Justice Department to look into revoking Mamdani’s citizenship, citing a 2017 rap lyric. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that if the claims were true, “it’s something that should be investigated.” President Trump threatened to arrest Mamdani if he interfered with immigration enforcement, and falsely suggested he was in the country illegally. Mamdani called the attacks “regular and repeated smears and slander” aimed at his faith.

On November 4, 2025, more than 2 million New Yorkers voted, the highest mayoral turnout in more than half a century. The AP called the race that night, with Mamdani about nine points ahead of Cuomo. At the Brooklyn Paramount theater, he quoted India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and then made the point that matters most to this series: New York would remain “a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and as of tonight, led by an immigrant.”

What came next surprised almost everyone.

“You can just say yes”

On November 21, the mayor-elect met Trump in the Oval Office. The president, who had called him a communist, now called him “a very rational person” and said he would be “cheering for him.” When a reporter asked Mamdani whether he still considered Trump a fascist, Trump cut in: “That’s okay. You can just say yes.”

The warmth didn’t settle the hard issues. In February, Mamdani signed an executive order barring federal immigration agents from city property such as schools, shelters and hospitals without a warrant. “ICE is more than a rogue agency — it is a manifestation of the abuse of power,” he said. The Department of Homeland Security said the policy would make the city less safe, and urged the city to turn over more than 7,000 people in its custody whom it described as criminals with active immigration detainers.

Promises kept, promises bent

Some campaign pledges arrived on schedule. In June, the Rent Guidelines Board voted 7-1 to freeze rents on one- and two-year leases for about a million stabilized apartments. “This is the relief that working people across our city deserve,” Mamdani said. Hours before the vote, the board’s landlord representative resigned in protest. She said the process had become politicized and that owners could not cover rising costs under a freeze. In January, he and Gov. Kathy Hochul announced free child care for 2-year-olds, starting with about 2,000 children this fall and paid for by the state for its first two years.

Other promises ran into Albany or into hard numbers. Bus fares are set by the state-run MTA, and by spring Mamdani was acknowledging that buses would likely not be free this year. He had floated a 9.5 percent property tax increase as a “last resort,” then dropped it in a $124.7 billion budget balanced largely with state help. He also pulled back from his pledge to expand the CityFHEPS rental voucher program. After 20 New Yorkers died during a February cold snap, he restarted homeless encampment sweeps that he had paused weeks earlier, now led by the homeless services department rather than the police. The Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless called it “another broken promise.” Some critics on the left accused him of making concessions before anyone had asked for them.

In polls, more New Yorkers have approved than disapproved. A Marist poll in April found 48 percent of New Yorkers approved of his job performance and 30 percent disapproved, with 63 percent of Republicans disapproving.

Back to the station

Mamdani was not on the ballot on November 3, but he celebrated the next day. His five charter amendments, which speed up bus and bike lanes, outdoor dining, construction and contracting and set rainy-day fund targets, all passed easily. The New York Post editorial board had opposed every one. Hochul, with whom he has worked closely, won reelection by nearly 20 points. But as amNewYork noted, several of his priorities, including expanding free child care, still depend on Albany, where she has resisted raising taxes on the wealthy.

The day after the election, he described his job in words that sound like a challenge to himself: “It is not a job to better manage a decline.”

Ten months after that midnight oath in a decommissioned subway station, the free buses he campaigned on are, by his own account, not coming this year. The mayor who took office underground, the boy from Kampala who arrived at 7, has three years left to show whether that station was a symbol or a promise.

Sources

Vasanth Vaidyanathan, Esq.

Administrator

Vasanth Vaidyanathan is an immigration attorney with over 20 years of experience focused exclusively on U.S. immigration and nationality law. He holds an LL.M. from California Western School of Law, San Diego and advises individuals and businesses on employment and family-based immigration matters, including H-1B, PERM, EB categories, and adjustment of status. He has also been a featured speaker at immigration seminars across the U.S. To reach Vasanth visit: https://www.vnathan.com/

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