In a Fourth of July address from New York City Hall, Mayor Zohran Mamdani spoke broadly to Americans, his constituents and immigrants, building around his testimony of coming to the U.S.and taking aim at the Trump administration’s policies of exclusion.
“The frontier may be closed, we may have walked on the moon, but the work of fulfilling the values first enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, that work endures, and it belongs to us all,” he said Friday.
The mayor delivered his address alongside 10 newly naturalized citizens, who were holding miniature flags, as he reflected on his path of becoming an American citizen in 2018.
“You each hold a special power, the power to determine what America means,” he added.
The speech, given at the writing desk that once belonged to President George Washington, did not directly name President Donald Trump, but it was a clear rebuke to the president’s immigration crackdown and politics of exclusion. Mamdani cast immigrants as impactful contributors to the progress of America, drawing a striking contrast to the recent campaign-style speeches given by Trump at various 250th anniversary celebrations that have focused on preserving monuments and included attacks on political adversaries.
The mayor’s address came just hours before the president was expected to head to South Dakota to speak at Mount Rushmore on Friday evening.
“As Thomas Paine once wrote, this new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty. Hither have they fled,” Mamdani said, quoting from Paine’s revolutionary 1776 pamphlet “Common Sense,” which argued the U.S. should be a haven for those escaping political and religious oppression in Europe.
Mamdani also addressed Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, describing them as “masked agents terrorizing our streets” and “spiriting” undocumented New Yorkers away.
He similarly described “the powerful” and their policy approach to immigration as “an arena of supremacy where only a select few are allowed freedom.”
“America, if you ask them, becomes less the more people it welcomes. America, they will tell you, belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin. The rest of us, they insist, should be grateful for merely being allowed to visit. How small they are, how weak, how unoriginal,” he continued.
Mamdani sought to reframe patriotism as more than reverence, but also the ability to dissent, and condemned those who say “love it or leave it.”
“Patriotism has never been about pretending our nation is without flaws. Patriotism is every act of righteous dissent. It is every march led under the heavy sun. It is every protest held a decade before its time, it is precisely because we love this nation that we will not leave it,” the mayor said. “After all, who loves America more than those who have sacrificed so much to make it free?”