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

And New Jersey A man who previously sued the New York City Police Department in a failed effort to find out whether the NYPD’s Intelligence Division spied on him and fellow Muslims as part of a notorious and widespread “mosque vandalism” program during the Michael Bloomberg era has filed a new open records lawsuit against the city over… Espionage allegationsaccording 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 hacked by the NYPD, according to Associated Press investigation in 2011 Which relied on leaked documents outlining the infiltration operations. 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 4-3 Decision of the Court of Appeal He confirmed the NYPD’s ability to use Glomar’s response to his 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 in which he was involved from 2006 through 2008. Petitionwhich was filed in December after the NYPD rejected the Terrorism Prevention Act and its subsequent appeal, cites specific intelligence reports from that period published by the Associated Press 14 years ago.

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