Zohran Mamdani on How to Resist Trump’s National Guard
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani held a rally with Bernie Sanders on Sept. 6, 2025. Mamdani took questions from the audience. One woman asked, “Could I ask how you’re going to protect this city from the National Guard coming in?”
Mamdani began his reply with a blunt, accurate observation: “The first thing is we have to prepare for the inevitability of that deployment. We cannot try and convince ourselves that because something is illegal, Donald Trump will not do it. We have to be prepared and we have to be clear eyed."
How should we prepare? Mamdani’s answer was 100 percent legalism: “We saw in California, the mayor of LA [Karen Bass], the Attorney General of the state [Rob Bonta], and the governor [Gavin Newsom] work together to fight back against the White House’s deployment of the National Guard. They filed a lawsuit. A federal judge [Charles Breyer] just recently found in their favor that the deployment of the National Guard was illegal.” Mamdani boasted that as mayor he, unlike Andrew Cuomo, would file a similar lawsuit by “working together with [attorney general] Tish James and [governor] Kathy Hochul to fight back against the deployment."
Trump sent National Guard troops into Los Angeles back at the beginning of June. Mamdani did not mention that the court ruling came months later.
Nor did Mamdani say a word about what the working class in Los Angeles did to fight ICE and the Guard: they organized groups to watch for the goons and spread the word. Dozens, sometimes hundreds, of people rushed to surround troops. More than once, squads gave up and left, sometimes in vehicles damaged by the protesters. “We’ve been out all day, from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m.—this is our city and we are fighting back against ICE. …We’re out here to support the ones who’ve disappeared—and if things go down, we’re here to protect those facing off with the police.” A protester wounded by a metal projectile was treated on the spot by a comrade. Night after night, youth launched car and bike caravans—horns blaring, engines roaring—keeping up morale and creating movement even as the police tried to scatter the crowds.
Mamdani did not urge his New York supporters to do any of these things.
It did not take long for events to expose the futility of Mamdani’s top-down, within-the-system approach. Only two days after his September 6 rally, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that immigration raids in Los Angeles can continue, quashing a lower court order that had barred agents from making stops without “reasonable suspicion.”
Mamdani is a social democrat, a long-time member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). He is devoted to pressing and cajoling Democratic officials for baby steps of reform. The role of working people in his eyes is to campaign and vote for him.
DSA’s reformism and its electoral concentration are directly opposite to communists’ doing all they can to wage class struggle and to build a communist party, the indispensable organization for victory over capitalism. You can vote for Mamdani if it makes you feel better, but if you ever get the opportunity, you might ask him: shouldn’t workers organize watch groups and networks that confront ICE and the Guard on the ground?
Charles Andrews is the author of The Hollow Colossus and other books.
A list of his occasional essays is at http://www.hollowcolossus.com/moreCA.htm