And New Jersey The man who previously sued the New York City Police Department in an unsuccessful quest to find out whether the NYPD’s intelligence division spied on him and his fellow Muslims as part of its notorious and expansive “mosque sweeps” program during the Michael Bloomberg era has filed a new public complaint against the city over spying allegations, according to information provided exclusively to WIRED.
The trial will be a test for Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s law enforcement policies, as he spoke out loudly against the NYPD’s spying on Muslim New Yorkers during a successful election campaign that persuaded those same communities to turn out in record numbers.
Samir Hashmi, a New Jersey resident, was part of the Rutgers Muslim Student Association in the late 2000s. The Rutgers MSA was one of dozens of organizations infiltrated by the NYPD, according to a 2011 Associated Press investigation that relied on leaked documents describing the undercover operations. Following a series of negative advertisements and a settled civil rights lawsuit in 2018, the NYPD’s “demographic unit” was disbanded. Hashmi did not sign the settlement and lost his initial records trial in 2018, when a 4-3 Court of Appeals decision upheld the NYPD’s ability to use a “Glomar” response to its request for documents about the mosque ransacking program, without confirming or denying the existence of such records.
hashtag later, cites specific intelligence reports from this period published 14 years ago by the Associated Press.
In an interview, Hashmi told WIRED that he was motivated by the loss of his father as well as his co-plaintiff in his original trial, Harlem imam Talib Abdur-Rashid (who died November 2025), to make a second attempt to uncover the truth about NYPD spying operations targeting Arab and Muslim organizations and communities in New York, surrounding states and elsewhere in the United States.
A strong supporter of Mamdani, Hashmi said he resumed his research into the Intelligence Division’s activities in and around New York in 2023, following the NYPD’s violent suppression of a series of protests over the past three years that are now the subject of two lawsuits alleging widespread violations of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. However, it was Mamdani’s decision to retain Jessica Tisch as police commissioner shortly after his election victory that spurred Hashmi into action.
