The mayor of New York City built his entire political identity on calling the NYPD racist, anti-queer, and “a major threat to public safety.” He campaigned to defund them, slash the department, and replace police with social workers. Then his wife, Rama Duwaji, decided she needed NYPD officers to escort her on a personal vacation to Syria and Lebanon — two countries the State Department has designated as Level 4: Do Not Travel.
The NYPD had a response. It was brief and blunt.
“The NYPD does not send officers to countries with level four travel advisories for discretionary reasons not linked to investigative work,” a department spokesperson told the New York Post.
That’s the whole story. The man who wanted to defund the police needed the police. The police told him no.
City Hall had been insisting that Rama Duwaji, Mamdani’s wife, would be accompanied by a taxpayer-funded NYPD security detail on her September 20 personal trip to the Middle East, and that the detail was traveling “upon the strong recommendation of the NYPD.” A source familiar with the arrangements noted that Duwaji had specifically requested the police protection after making a previous overseas trip without it.
The NYPD rejected the “strong recommendation” framing entirely. The department contradicted City Hall’s account in public, which is not exactly a sign of a healthy relationship between the mayor and the department he once wanted to dismantle.
Former Bronx Assemblyman Dov Hikind went straight to the point: “We’re putting the police officers in danger. They will be viewed as the bad guys. These are war zones.” He then added — with a candor that City Hall clearly didn’t appreciate — that Duwaji “will get a hero’s welcome and be protected by Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis.”
That observation is not a throwaway line. Duwaji has a documented social media history that includes posts appearing to celebrate the October 7 Hamas massacres and dismissing reports of sexual violence against Israeli women as a “mass rape hoax.” The suggestion that she would be comfortable in the company of those groups is therefore not a frivolous one.
The episode also blows up the “private citizen” narrative that Mamdani has deployed whenever questions arise about his wife’s political influence. Private citizens don’t require official NYPD security details for family visits. Private citizens don’t have City Hall spokespersons issuing statements about their travel security arrangements. Reporting has already established that Duwaji served as a de facto campaign adviser during Mamdani’s mayoral run, helping shape strategy, messaging, and visuals.
Private citizen. Who needed a police escort to Syria. From the department her husband wanted to abolish.
The NYPD said no. The contradiction said everything else.
