The NYPD has filed a lawsuit over potential records collected through the Islamic spy program

New Jersey The man who previously sued the New York City Police Department in an unsuccessful effort to find out whether the NYPD’s Intelligence Division spied on him and his Muslim colleagues as part of the notorious and widespread “mosque destruction” program during the Michael Bloomberg era has filed a new lawsuit against the city over spying allegations, according to information provided exclusively to WIRED.

The lawsuit will be a test of Mayor-elect Zahran Mamdani’s law enforcement policies, as he spoke out against the NYPD’s spying on New York’s Muslims during a successful election campaign that convinced those same communities to turn out in record numbers.

Sameer Hashemi, a New Jersey resident, was part of the Muslim Student Association at Rutgers in the late 2000s. Rutgers MSA was one of dozens of organizations infiltrated by the NYPD, according to a 2011 Associated Press investigation that relied on leaked documents outlining the infiltrations. After rounds of negative publicity and a civil rights lawsuit that was settled in 2018, the NYPD’s “demographics unit” was disbanded. Hashemi did not sign the settlement and lost the original open records case in 2018, when a 4-3 appeals court decision affirmed the NYPD’s ability to use Glomar’s response to its request for documents about the mosque looting program, and neither confirmed nor denied the existence of such records.

Hashemi filed a new set of records requests under the New York 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 specific mosques — relating to community and religious organizations he was involved with from 2006 through 2008. His petition, filed in December after the NYPD rejected the ATF and its subsequent appeal, cites reports Specific intelligence from that period was published 14 years ago by the Associated Press.

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

Hashemi, a staunch supporter of Mamdani, said he resumed his research into the Intelligence Division’s activities in New York and surrounding areas in 2023, due to 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 widespread violations of the First and 14th Amendments. However, it was Mamdani’s decision to retain Jessica Tisch as police commissioner shortly after his election victory that prompted Hashmi to act.