The trial will be a test for the law enforcement policies of newly elected Mayor Zohran Mamdani, as he spoke out vocally against NYPD spying on Muslim New Yorkers during a successful election campaign that drew those same communities to turn out in record numbers.
New Jersey resident Samir Hashmi was part of the Rutgers Muslim Student Association in the late 2000s. According to an Associated Press investigation in 2011, the Rutgers MSA was one of dozens of organizations infiltrated by the NYPD, relying on leaked documents outlining the infiltration operations. After a period of negative publicity and a civil rights lawsuit settled in 2018, the NYPD “Demographics Unit” was disbanded. Hashmi did not sign the agreement and lost his original open-records case in 2018, when a 4-3 Court of Appeals decision affirmed the NYPD’s ability to use the “Glomar” response to their request for documents about the mosque-razing program, neither confirming nor denying the existence of such records.
Hashmi filed a new set of records requests under the New York Freedom of Information Act in February, seeking a narrower set of records than his previous request – weekly intelligence summaries, profiles of specific organizations targeted by the Intelligence Division, and reports on particular mosques – related to the community and religious organizations he attended from 2006 to 2008. His petition, filed in December after the NYPD rejected his FOIL and subsequent appeal, cites specific intelligence reports from that period published 14 years ago. By the Associated Press.
In an interview, Hashmi told WIRED that he was inspired by the passing of his father, as well as his co-plaintiff in the original lawsuit, Harlem Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid (who died in November 2025), to make a second effort to uncover the truth about the NYPD’s spying operations targeting Arab and Muslim organizations and communities in New York City, surrounding states, and elsewhere in the United States.
A staunch supporter of Mamdani, Hashmi said he resumed his research on Intelligence Division activities in New York and surrounding areas in 2023, inspired by the NYPD’s violent crackdown on a series of protests over the past three years, now the subject of a pair of lawsuits alleging massive violations of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. However, it was Mamdani’s decision to retain Jessica Tisch as police commissioner immediately after her election victory that pushed Hashmi into action.
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