NYPD Sued Over Possible Records Collected Through Muslim Spying Program

A New Jersey man who previously sued the New York City Police Department in an unsuccessful quest to find out whether the NYPD’s Intelligence Division spied on him and fellow Muslims as part of its notorious and expansive “mosque-raking” program during the Michael Bloomberg era has filed a new open-records lawsuit against the city over spying claims, according to information exclusively provided to WIRED.

The lawsuit will pose a test for mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s law enforcement policies, as he spoke out vocally against the NYPD’s spying on Muslim New Yorkers during a successful election campaign that coaxed those very communities to turn out in record numbers.

Samir Hashmi, a New Jersey resident, was part of the Rutgers Muslim Student Association during the late 2000s. The Rutgers MSA was one of dozens of organizations infiltrated by the NYPD, according to an Associated Press investigation in 2011 that relied on leaked documents outlining the infiltration operations. Following rounds of negative publicity and a civil rights suit that was settled in 2018, the NYPD “demographics unit” was disbanded. Hashmi did not sign on to the settlement and lost his original open-records case in 2018, when a 4-3 Court of Appeals decision affirmed the NYPD’s ability to use a “Glomar” response to his request for documents about the mosque-raking program, neither confirming nor denying the existence of such records.

Hashmi filed a new set of record requests under the New York Freedom of Information Law in February asking for a narrower set of records than his previous request—weekly intelligence summaries, profiles of specific organizations targeted by the Intelligence Division, and reports on particular mosques—pertaining to community and religious organizations he participated in from 2006 through 2008. His petition, filed in December after the NYPD rejected his FOIL and subsequent appeal, cites specific intelligence reports from that period published 14 years ago by the Associated Press.

In an interview, Hashmi told WIRED he was motivated by the loss of his father as well as his co-plaintiff in his original suit, Harlem Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid (who passed away in November 2025), to take a second crack at uncovering the truth about the NYPD’s spying operations targeting Arab and Muslim organizations and communities in New York City, the surrounding states, and elsewhere in the United States.

A firm supporter of Mamdani, Hashmi said he restarted his research into the Intelligence Division’s activities in New York and the surrounding areas in 2023, prompted by the NYPD’s violent crackdown on a series of protests in the past three years that are now the subject of a pair of lawsuits alleging rampant First and Fourteenth Amendment violations. However, it was Mamdani’s decision to retain Jessica Tisch as police commissioner shortly after his election victory that pushed Hashmi into action.

“When I found out that Jessica Tisch’s background was in the NYPD Intelligence Division, that absolutely rang alarm bells in my mind,” Hashmi said. “I knew that was an immediate no for me.”

The NYPD’s blanket surveillance of local Muslim and Arab communities following the September 11, 2001, attacks is infamous in certain corners of the city, as the department’s Intelligence Division took on the operational posture and methodology of a national security directorate. The demographics unit mapped out New York City’s various ethnic enclaves of Muslim and Middle Eastern communities, while undercover cops and informants infiltrated mosques, cafés, soccer leagues, and student associations to catch alleged terrorist plots before they came to fruition. Despite the manpower and funding devoted to the spying program, the NYPD’s demographics unit failed to generate a single lead on potential terrorism plots, by the department's own admission.

Even though the mosque raking program was halted over a decade ago, and Mamdani, NYC’s first Muslim mayor, will be sworn in on January 1, Islamophobia is still prevalent among segments of the city. Just this month, the police commissioner’s brother called Mamdani an “enemy” of the Jewish people, and Queens councilwoman Vickie Paladino within the past month posted anti-Muslim screeds on social media, including a call for the “expulsion of Muslims from western nations.” While Paladino deleted the initial posts, she told reporters, “They can call me Islamophobic if they want—the word has no meaning whatsoever. This isn’t 2008.” The same week, Paladino published an op-ed in the Queens Jewish Link repeating her call for “massive sweeps of Muslim neighborhoods.”

“This conversation needs to happen now, at this moment. There needs to be a reckoning for what they did and what they’re still doing,” Hashmi said, noting that Mamdani appeared at his co-plaintiff’s funeral prayer and made a vow to continue the imam’s work. “One of Imam Talib’s many legacies is this lawsuit. So if he’s honest about continuing the work that Imam Talib was doing, then he’s not going to let the NYPD fight me on this,” he said.

The NYPD and mayor-elect Mamdani did not respond to requests for comment.

Hashmi’s allegations of ongoing surveillance echo comments in federal court in early 2025 by Muhammad Faridi, the civilian representative to the NYPD’s consent decree who oversees its political surveillance operations. Faridi said Muslim communities have continually reported being questioned by unidentified law enforcement agents. The report also points out that the local Joint Terrorism Task Force is not bound by the court strictures on NYPD surveillance.

“Muslims are still the overwhelming category of these investigations, and there’s a whole joint terrorism task force that gets to skirt these rules,” Hashmi said.

NYPD Intel’s Muslim spying program seems to be radioactive even among fellow law enforcement. A 2011 email allegedly from an unnamed FBI official to an intelligence firm executive unearthed in 2012 by Wikileaks and Truthout, still makes for astonishing reading 13 years later.

“I keep telling you, you and I are going to laugh and raise a beer one day, when everything Intel has been involved in during the last 10 years comes out—it always eventually comes out,” the FBI official wrote. They are going to make [former FBI director J. Edgar] Hoover, COINTEL, Red Squads, etc look like rank amatures [sic] compared to some of the damn right felonious activity, and violations of US citizen’s rights they have been engaged in.”

Almost two decades after he believes the NYPD began spying on him, Hashmi wants New York City’s newest mayor to pull back the veil on what he believes to be the NYPD’s post-9/11 abuses and fully account for the Intelligence Division’s alleged past activities.

“Why is NYPD still fighting a glorified Sunday school teacher so hard after 20 years?” Hashmi said. “What do they have to hide?”