Mayor Mamdani's immigrant affairs leader: NYC faces a moment of 'urgency'

Mayor Zohran Mamdani has promised new funding and different priorities for the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs, and he’s entrusted a daughter of immigrants to lead the effort.

Faiza Ali, a longtime community organizer and former City Council staffer, is the office's new commissioner. She is charged with advancing Mamdani’s agenda and serving the city's immigrants amid what she calls the Trump administration’s “chaotic and aggressive” approach to immigration enforcement.

Ali said in an interview that new funding for immigrant services, including millions more dollars for legal services, is critical as the city faces a surge in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests — and as immigrant New Yorkers report fears about ICE actions, accessing city services and even venturing outside.

Ali grew up in Brooklyn. Her Pakistani immigrant parents opened up their two-bedroom apartment to host other newly arrived immigrant families. She has been out front on public policy issues before, as part of the decadelong campaign to add two Muslim holidays to the city public school calendar. She joined the City Council staff in 2014.

In her current role, Ali said she’s focused on addressing the immediate threats facing immigrant New Yorkers by providing legal support, protecting the city’s sanctuary laws and ensuring immigrants know their rights. But she said she’s also focused on ensuring immigrants are incorporated into Mamdani’s larger affordability agenda.

“I think this is a vision that I share with the mayor: for MOIA to ensure immigrant New Yorkers are not only protected in moments of crisis but are able to fully participate and contribute and thrive in the city in really every part of city life,” Ali said.

Here’s a transcript of Ali’s interview with Gothamist, edited for length and clarity.

Tell me more about what life was like for you growing up in Brooklyn, as the daughter of two Pakistani immigrants.

Faiza Ali: I'm the proud daughter of immigrants from Azad Kashmir in Pakistan. So for me, I understand personally what is at stake for immigrant families in this city.

My father first arrived in New York in the late '60s, and my mom joined him after they got married in the early '70s. My dad briefly worked as a dishwasher and at a local knitting factory in Brooklyn before he eventually secured a union job as an elevator operator. My mom worked from home as a seamstress. She sewed shalwar kameez, and while doing that she raised five public school kids.

And she did something that I think really set me on a path of my journey in organizing and work in public service. She opened up our home. I grew up in a two-bedroom rent-stabilized apartment. She opened up that space for other newly arrived families from our community, and so our home was often their first stop in this country.

So that experience, my experience in community organizing, really has been grounded in the belief that government should work for people, especially those who are too often excluded from power or opportunity. And it's with that sort of spirit, that experience in organizing, my upbringing, that really has led me to my current capacity as commissioner for MOIA.

Can you take me through the greatest hits of your work before you became commissioner? What have you done for the city that you’ve been most proud of, and what from that work are you hoping to take into your time as commissioner?

It’s my work in community organizing. I worked at a number of nonprofit organizations before joining government, when I started at the City Council in 2014.

Prior to that, I worked on the campaign to incorporate two Muslim holidays in the public school calendar. That was like a 10-year organizing campaign, myself alongside several other organizers. That coalition was so broad. It included labor organizations. It included other faith institutions, other nonprofits.

That journey was really an important one for me to understand that every community deserves to be treated with dignity and respect, and sometimes you have to demand that dignity and respect. And so what started off as many thought a symbolic gesture — getting days off or getting recognition for your holidays in the public school calendar — really turned into a larger campaign about inclusion, about respect.

And so, I'm most proud about that campaign, specifically because it really was an opportunity for the Muslim community to feel empowered, to understand and test what organizing looks like, and that there was proof that when you organize, you can win.

And then of course, building off of that work, the advocacy work around police reform and immigration reform when I was at the Arab American Association [of New York] is another highlight. My organizing happened in a post-9/11 context, where the community really has been fighting to be seen, to feel empowered and to be respected. So a lot of my work was around empowering the community, and the way you did that was you joined other fights. You worked alongside other communities. You built power in coalition.

I carried those organizing principles with me even inside the halls of government. I think in the beginning, I was also struggling when I transitioned and started working at the Council. Like, how do you organize large institutions and local government? And I don't know if you quite can do that. You can't maybe organize the systems, but you can always organize people no matter where you are.

And I think that that is what has frankly kept me inside government: finding allies, working with folks who have your shared values and a shared vision.

Under Mayor Eric Adams, when there was a surge in asylum-seekers, many officials considered it a crisis. For you, is New York City still in a crisis?

I think it's really important to take a little bit of a step back. This current administration under Mayor Mamdani came in understanding that immigrant New Yorkers' needs are both urgent and a long-term investment — urgent to meet the current moment and the climate that we are in, given the chaotic and aggressive federal government and their approach to immigration enforcement, but also thinking about the long-term investment in the community as well.

So I think that we've shifted from operating in a state of emergency, given at that time there was an influx of migrants arriving to the city, to how can we support the immigrant community right now, which is still quite frankly facing different levels of attack.

I think that it's a different level of urgency compared to the previous administration, and the focus really is how are we uplifting the immigrant community? How are we protecting the immigrant community? And how are we investing in their long-term stability?

At a City Council hearing in March, you said it was no secret the previous administration undermined the role of the MOIA. What did you mean by that?

It was a combination of factors. I think the previous administration wasn't shy about — the previous mayor, I'll say — he wasn't shy about his feelings towards sanctuary city policy, for example. And he went as far as to attack it on a number of occasions, to call for it to be weakened in ways that I think were in real conflict with how New York City sees the role of immigrants in our city. So that led to a lot of distrust between a lot of community-based organizations and immigrant leaders.

I think the [new] mayor within his first 100 days proved that immigrant New Yorkers are a priority when he issued Executive Order 13 that reinforced our sanctuary city policy, but it went further in placing additional safeguards that protect immigrant New Yorkers.

So I think that we are in a new era. I know that that's something the mayor often says, but I think it's actually underscored further with just the way the current mayor has been approaching this issue. Like, we know New York City has always been shaped by immigrants. And I think this is a vision that I share with the mayor: for MOIA to ensure immigrant New Yorkers are not only protected in moments of crisis but are able to fully participate and contribute and thrive in the city in really every part of city life.

You told me when you were first appointed that your goals were to “prioritize strengthening protections, expanding access to legal and language services and building real pathways to stability.” Now that you're actually in the role, what are your priorities now, and how do you plan on achieving them?

It is really clear to me that the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs exists to protect immigrant New Yorkers, to expand opportunity and really build systems that ensure safety, dignity and stability. So for me, we do want to make sure that immigrant New Yorkers know their rights. They can access city services. People should be able to go to school, seek healthcare or call for help without fear.

And so that is a big part of the work that we are doing and continuing to do, is to make sure that immigrant New Yorkers first and foremost know their rights.

And also a big part of our work is coordinating across city government, so city agencies are aligned and they are prepared to support the long-term stability of immigrant communities. And that could mean anything from childcare or around housing, education and healthcare services. And we do that in a variety of different settings.

One is through our interagency taskforce that meets quarterly. But also I've been spending time reaching out to commissioners at various mayoral offices and city agencies to really start deepening that relationship that MOIA has with our agency partners.

We're also expanding support for immigration legal services in a major way — in a way that I think is really responsive to some of the critical needs of immigrant communities. And so I think a good reference point is the budget. The mayor added about $32 million to support immigrant communities, including money for and funding for legal services.

We're still working through how those resources would be utilized. But what I know for sure is that that money is going to support existing programs within MOIA, specifically around our rapid response legal collaborative. They are filing habeas petitions. They are consulting and providing real-time information to individuals who reach out and say, "Hey, I have an appointment," or, “I have an interview tomorrow. I don't have an attorney. What do I need to know going into that interview? How am I supposed to prepare myself and my family?"

There's been a surge in ICE arrests in New York City under President Donald Trump. What do you see as the Mamdani administration's role in addressing the surge?

The actions of the federal government have really made our work on the local level far more urgent and more grounded in protection and trust and preparedness.

New York City is and will remain a sanctuary city, and we're not going to turn our back on people who settled here or are coming to our city and calling New York City home. And there is no place in our city for systems that unjustly tear families apart.

And I think our response to the federal government really requires local government to back up sanctuary policies with real action. So it starts with the executive order, which did a great job in laying out how are we protecting immigrant New Yorkers and how are agencies fully complying with sanctuary laws already on the books.

But I think it's important that we also be honest about what families are experiencing right now across the city. I don't know if it's possible to really encapsulate the level of fear and uncertainty amongst immigrant communities, whether it's fear of enforcement or fear of family separation or fear of even asking for help. And I think that fear is why our work is so focused on rebuilding trust and ensuring people can still access city services safely.

I did want to also uplift something that the mayor has also uplifted, which is that we operate a free and confidential immigration legal support hotline that's available in 200-plus languages. It's for New Yorkers regardless of immigration status. That hotline and those resources, they're often the first places that families turn to when they're scared and when they're unsure of what to do.

There have been a number of activists and lawmakers who have called on the mayor to outline clearer rules on when and how the NYPD interacts with ICE agents, given the city’s sanctuary protections limiting cooperation on immigration enforcement. Do you think there need to be clearer guidelines?

I think part of the executive order process focuses on individual agencies. I think there were six public safety agencies that were subject to the audit. Part of what we're hoping to uncover through that process is a better understanding of the current policies, how those sanctuary policies are being carried out by agencies, and then the most important thing is: What are the gaps? Are there gaps? And how do we ensure that we are complying with sanctuary policies that are some of the strongest in the country?

So the executive order and the audit is an opportunity for us to get more information about how agencies are complying with the law.