Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, met with President Donald Trump at the White House on Thursday and used a mock newspaper front page to pitch what he and his team described as a plan for major federal housing investments in the city, the Associated Press reported. The previously unannounced meeting lasted about an hour, according to the report, and focused on housing while also touching immigration enforcement actions involving students.
Anna Bahr, Mamdani’s communications director, said the mayor’s team created the mock front page and headlines for Trump to review and to show what reaction they expected new federal housing investments could generate. Bahr said Mamdani’s office posted a photo from the meeting on social media that included the front page.
Bahr said Trump was “very enthusiastic” about Mamdani’s housing proposal. She said the plan would allow 12,000 new affordable homes to be built at Sunnyside Yard in Queens by securing more than $21 billion in federal grants, and that the proposal could create 30,000 jobs. Mamdani’s office estimated the effort would be the biggest housing and infrastructure investment in more than 50 years.
The mock New York Daily News front page said “Trump to City: Let’s Build,” AP reported, describing it as a riff on a 1975 cover that read “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” referring to Gerald Ford’s vow to veto financial assistance to the city. The report said Mamdani’s team presented the mock page to Trump during the Thursday meeting.
The AP report said Mamdani and Trump have kept a cordial relationship since their first meeting last fall. When Trump ran for mayor, the report said he repeatedly maligned Mamdani as a “communist,” but it also said Trump appeared charmed by him after their one-on-one meeting in November. In that November meeting, Bahr said Trump encouraged Mamdani to return with an idea for building big things in New York City.
During Thursday’s meeting, Mamdani also raised the detainment of Ellie Aghayeva, a Columbia University student from Azerbaijan who was arrested earlier Thursday by federal immigration agents, according to the report. Aghayeva’s attorneys and Columbia’s president said the agents accessed a campus residence by claiming they were searching for a “missing person,” the report said.
Bahr said that in a phone call after the White House meeting, Trump told Mamdani that Aghayeva would be released. Mamdani also gave White House chief of staff Susie Wiles a list of four other students targeted by federal authorities and asked for the administration’s help with them, AP reported.
The four students named by the AP report were Mahmoud Khalil, Yunseo Chung, Mohsen Mahdawi and Leqaa Kordia. AP reported that all four were detained for their roles in pro-Palestinian protests and that, among them, only Kordia remains in custody, though the cases are proceeding through the courts.
Kordia’s cousin, Hamzah Abushaban, said in a statement that he was urging the president to release her, calling her “the beloved daughter of an American citizen.” Abushaban said Kordia has been held in ICE detention for nearly a year and added that she has “endured fear, isolation,” including “even [suffer[ing] a] seizure while trapped behind those walls.” AI generated content. CC0 license: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/