Zohran Mamdani, who will be sworn in as mayor of New York City on Jan 1, has appointed anti-Israel attorney Ramzi Kassem as the city’s chief counsel.
He announced the hire on Dec. 30 at a press conference at NYC Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst, saying Kassem would be joining the administration from CUNY, “where he serves as a professor of law.”
The mayor-elect noted that Kassem “served as a policy adviser for President Biden from 2022 to 2024, and has deep experience arguing in court, including before the Supreme Court,” adding that he would “turn to Ramzi for his remarkable experience and his commitment to defending those too often abandoned by our legal system.”
He wrote that Kassem has “been on the front lines of providing legal defense for students detained by ICE and supporting many more at risk.”
Kassem, 47, who wrote anti-Israel articles for his campus newspaper as a student, is co-founder of Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility (CLEAR) at the CUNY School of Law. Lawyers from CLEAR, including Kassem, represented Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate detained by immigration authorities for allegedly leading anti-Israel protests.
In a video produced by the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans (Kassem was a fellow for the organization in 2001), Kassem said that “9/11 happened and of course that changed everything,” shifting his legal focus to representing detainees held at Guantanamo Bay and Bagram Air Base.
Kassem was the lead defense counsel for Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi Arabian national and Al-Qaeda operative convicted by a U.S. military commission in connection with the 2002 attack on the French oil tanker Limburg. Kassem and his students have represented 15 prisoners held at Guantánamo, Bagram and other facilities.
