Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon threatened to investigate Zohran Mamdani over his proposal to tax ‘whiter neighborhoods’ in NYC if he becomes the mayor. “Racial discrimination is illegal in the United States – period. Full stop! The illegal discriminatory scheme described by Mamdani would violate federal constitutional and statutory norms, and might even violate New York law,” Dhillon said on Benny Johnson show amid strong resistance of Republicans against Mamdani who appeared to win the New York Democratic primary after Andrew Cuomo conceded the race to Mamdani. While Republicans have called for Mamdani’s deportation, Dhillon said Mamdani’s proposal to shift the tax burden to “richer and whiter neighborhoods” can be investigated as this is also racial discrimination.

What did Mamdani say about taxes?

Zohran Mamdani’s election document said the property tax system is unbalanced because assessment levels are artificially capped, so homeowners in expensive neighborhoods pay less than their fair share. He proposed that neighborhoods in Jamaica and Brownsville should pay lower taxes while Brooklyn can pay more taxes. “The Mayor can fix this by pushing class assessment percentage down for everyone and adjusting rates up, effectively lowering tax payments for homeowners in neighborhoods like Jamaica and Brownsville while training the amount paid in the most expensive Brooklyn brownstones,” the document said. Interestingly, the threat comes from Dhillon who is also an Indian-American and Mamdani is also of Indian origin. Dhillon was born in Chandigarh and came to the United States as a child. She graduated from Dartmouth College and the University of Virginia Law School. In 2016, she became the first Indian-American to take the stage at the GOP convention. Mamdani, on the other hand, was not born in India but both his parents have Indian origin. Mamdani was born in Uganda and came to the US in 1998. He became a US citizen in 2018, which also came on the radar after he inched closer to being the first Muslim mayor of New York City.