NYPD Sued Over Possible Records Collected Through Muslim Spy Program

And New Jersey The 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 his fellow Muslims as part of its notorious and expansive “mosque sweeps” program during the Michael Bloomberg era has filed a new lawsuit against the city. espionage allegationsaccording to information exclusively provided to WIRED.

The trial will be a test for Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s law enforcement policies, as he spoke out loudly against the NYPD’s spying on Muslim New Yorkers during a successful election campaign that persuaded those same communities to turn out in record numbers.

Samir Hashmi, a New Jersey resident, was part of the Rutgers Muslim Student Association in the late 2000s. The Rutgers MSA was one of dozens of organizations infiltrated by the NYPD, according to a Associated Press investigation in 2011 which relied on leaked documents describing undercover operations. Following a series of negative advertisements and a settled civil rights lawsuit in 2018, the NYPD’s “demographic unit” was disbanded. Hashmi did not sign the settlement and lost his initial file in 2018, when a 4-3 Decision of the Court of Appeal asserted the NYPD’s ability to use a “Glomar” response to its request for documents on the mosque destruction program, without confirming or denying the existence of such documents.

Hashmi filed a new round of records requests under New York’s Freedom of Information Act in February, requesting 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 — regarding community and religious organizations in which he participated from 2006 to 2008. petitionfiled 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 that he was motivated by the loss of his father as well as his co-plaintiff in his original lawsuit, Harlem imam Talib Abdur-Rashid (who died in November 2025), in a second attempt to uncover the truth about New York Police spy operations targeting Arab and Muslim organizations and communities in New York, surrounding states and elsewhere in the United States.

A strong supporter of Mamdani, Hashmi said he resumed his research into the Intelligence Division’s activities in and around New York in 2023, following the NYPD’s violent suppression of a series of protests over the past three years that are now the subject of two lawsuits alleging widespread violations of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. However, it was Mamdani’s decision to retain Jessica Tisch as police commissioner shortly after his election victory that spurred Hashmi into action.