Draft:Ramzi Kassem

• Comment: I know there's better sources out there, I'm sure of it, I've seen them. However, this article has one profile, one appointment, and then a few official bios - that's not enough. Jishara (please ping upon response) (talk) 15:41, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

---

Ramzi Kassem
Kassem in 2015
Chief Counsel to the Mayor of New York City
Incumbent
Assumed office January 1, 2026
Appointed by	Zohran Mamdani
Personal details
Born	1977 or 1978 (age 48–49) Lebanon
Citizenship	United States
Domestic partner	Darializa Avila Chevalier (2023–present)
Education	Columbia College (BA) Pantheon-Sorbonne University Columbia Law School (JD)
Occupation	Lawyer law professor government official
Known for	Founding the CLEAR clinic at CUNY School of Law
Website	www.law.cuny.edu/faculty-profile/ramzi-kassem/

Ramzi Kassem (born c. 1978) is an American lawyer, legal scholar, and government official who has served as Chief Counsel to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani since 2026. He is a professor of law at the City University of New York School of Law, where in 2009 he founded CLEAR (Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility), a legal clinic and non-profit representing Muslim and other communities targeted by counterterrorism and national security policing.

Kassem argued Tanzin v. Tanvir before the Supreme Court of the United States, a challenge to the federal government's use of terrorist watchlists that produced a unanimous ruling for his clients, and he has defended fifteen prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Bagram Air Base, and other U.S. facilities. He also sued the New York City Police Department over its surveillance of Muslim New Yorkers and represented Mahmoud Khalil in his deportation case. From 2022 to 2024 he took leave from CUNY to serve as a senior policy advisor on the Domestic Policy Council in the Biden White House.

Kassem's appointment as Mamdani's chief counsel drew criticism from conservative commentators and some Jewish organizations, both over his advocacy for Palestinian causes and over his earlier defense of Guantanamo detainee Ahmed al-Darbi. His appearance at a September 11 commemoration at City Hall in 2026 prompted further criticism from relatives of 9/11 victims and Republican officials.

Early life and education

Kassem spent his childhood in Beirut, Baghdad, Damascus, and Amman, moving repeatedly to escape wartime violence. He has recalled his father reading The Count of Monte Cristo aloud to him and his sisters in an interior hallway while bombs fell on Beirut, and, as a teenager in Baghdad, a family life shaped by the assumption that informants were listening and that their home was being searched in their absence. He has described New York City as his first stable and permanent home.

He earned a bachelor's degree from Columbia College, a master's degree in law from Pantheon-Sorbonne University, and a Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School, where he was a senior editor of the Columbia Law Review.

Kassem was a law student at Columbia during the September 11 attacks in 2001. In the weeks that followed he encountered Islamophobic remarks on campus, including a classmate's suggestion that he was connected to the attacks, and concluded that his Muslim and Arab classmates were being pushed toward either political silence or demonstrative patriotism. Rejecting both, he committed himself to representing Muslims targeted on national security grounds and detainees held without charge at Guantanamo Bay.

Academic career

Before joining the CUNY faculty, Kassem taught law at Yale and Fordham. At CUNY he is a professor of law whose scholarship, teaching, and clinical practice address what he describes as the expressions and excesses of the U.S. security state at home and abroad.

In 2009 Kassem founded CLEAR, an award-winning clinic and legal non-profit housed at CUNY School of Law that supports clients and communities in the New York City area targeted by local, state, or federal agencies in the name of national security and counterterrorism. He continued to co-direct the project, whose work has included defending students detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. For more than a decade he also directed or co-directed the law school's Immigrant & Non-Citizen Rights Clinic.

Kassem has argued before the Supreme Court, the Second Circuit (including en banc), the D.C. Circuit, several federal district courts, the military commission at Guantanamo Bay, and immigration courts. In addition to law review articles and book chapters, his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, and The Guardian.

He served on a three-member delegation of international legal experts convened by the International Federation for Human Rights to assess the French state of emergency, and led a feasibility study on clinical legal education in Tunisia for the Public Interest Law Network. He has lectured in France, Germany, Italy, Lebanon, Mexico, Morocco, Poland, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom, and has conducted case-related fact-finding missions in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, and Yemen.

Homeland

Kassem was a prominent critic of the Showtime series Homeland, arguing that its Muslim characters were almost uniformly portrayed as terrorists or terrorist sympathizers. In 2016 the show's creator, Alex Gansa, contacted him after reading his writing; Kassem initially told the producers they had the wrong person because he was not a fan of the show, but agreed to consult after they proved open to his criticism. He was asked to identify inaccuracies and racist depictions, and said he felt a social responsibility to make the show more realistic and more critical of the government's role in counterterrorism, given its influence on decision-makers and the public. A character introduced in the sixth season, Reda Hashem, an outspoken lawyer defending the rights of Muslim Americans, was modeled on him.

Legal practice

Watchlisting and surveillance litigation

Kassem argued Tanzin v. Tanvir before the Supreme Court, a civil rights case challenging the federal government's abuse of watchlists, which the Court decided unanimously in favor of his clinic's clients. In Raza v. City of New York, a challenge to covert NYPD surveillance, he helped negotiate a settlement restricting surveillance of constitutionally protected religious and political activity. Among the plaintiffs he represented was Asad Dandia, who sued the police department after an informant infiltrated his charity, Muslims Giving Back.

Guantanamo Bay and the al-Darbi case

Kassem and his students have defended fifteen prisoners of various nationalities held without fair process at Guantanamo Bay, Bagram Air Base, and other disclosed or secret U.S. facilities. Their advocacy has established law-of-war precedent and secured the release of eleven clients, with repatriations or resettlements negotiated in Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, the United Kingdom, Uruguay, and Yemen. He has said he wore a suit on every visit to the detention facility, unlike most of the lawyers there, because he had learned that detainees kept one of their two jumpsuits cleaner for meetings and he wanted them to know he took their cases seriously.

His best-known client was Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi national whose sister was married to Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the hijackers of the aircraft flown into the Pentagon. Kassem was lead defense counsel in United States v. Ahmed al-Darbi before a military commission. In February 2014, al-Darbi pleaded guilty to terrorism charges and to attacking civilians and civilian objects, admitting he had helped plan and supply the 2002 al-Qaeda bombing of the French oil tanker Limburg off the coast of Yemen—an attack that killed a Bulgarian crew member, injured about a dozen others, and caused a large oil spill. Kassem announced the plea in court and called the moment "bittersweet"; under the agreement al-Darbi cooperated with prosecutors and became a potential witness against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

Al-Darbi was transferred to Saudi custody in 2018, the only prisoner released from Guantanamo during the first Trump administration. Kassem welcomed the repatriation, saying he hoped it marked the end of an injustice after what he described as sixteen painful years in captivity.

Federal terrorism and immigration cases

Kassem has appeared as defense counsel or advised defense teams in federal terrorism prosecutions, including United States v. Uzair Paracha, which ended in his client's exoneration and repatriation to Pakistan after seventeen years of incarceration. He and his students have also represented immigrants and asylum-seekers in immigration court, before the Board of Immigration Appeals, and in federal court. He has worked with coalitions including Communities United for Police Reform and the Movement for Black Lives.

In 2025 he represented Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate and lawful permanent resident who became the most prominent target of the Trump administration's campaign against pro-Palestinian campus protesters. Khalil was arrested in his Columbia residence by ICE and held for 104 days before his release that June, with his case continuing thereafter. Kassem also represented Yunseo Chung, a Columbia junior and lawful permanent resident whom immigration authorities sought to arrest and deport after she was arrested at a protest at Barnard College. Unlike Khalil, Chung sued while still free, and in March 2025 federal judge Naomi Buchwald ordered the administration to halt its efforts to detain her and barred her transfer out of the Southern District of New York. Kassem said the government was trying to silence pro-Palestinian activism.

White House service

From 2022 to 2024, Kassem took leave from CUNY to serve as a senior policy advisor at the White House, having been hired by Domestic Policy Council director Susan Rice. His portfolio included the immigration court backlog, immigration legislation and regulation, watchlisting, screening and profiling policy, and countering the threats posed by commercial spyware. He led interagency policy committees and worked with the National Security Council's Intelligence Programs and Transborder directorates. CUNY describes him as the first member of its faculty appointed to serve at the White House.

After the October 7 attacks in 2023 and the start of the Gaza war, Kassem convened more than thirty staff members with an interest in the Middle East but unrelated portfolios to discuss the administration's response, then requested a meeting with senior officials. In November 2023 he and more than a dozen colleagues met with deputy national security advisor Jon Finer—a former student of his in a Yale clinic—chief of staff Jeff Zients, and senior advisor Anita Dunn, presenting proposals that included conditioning support for Israel on reducing civilian deaths in Gaza. Two people present described a tense exchange between Kassem and Finer.

Chief Counsel to the Mayor of New York City

Appointment

Kassem's name emerged during a search process in which former Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan sought a chief counsel who would neither obstruct Mamdani's agenda nor defer to it. During his interview Kassem anticipated the criticism his appointment would attract, predicting a New York Post headline close to the one later published.

On December 30, 2025, at a press conference at Elmhurst Hospital, mayor-elect Mamdani announced Kassem as his chief counsel, citing "his remarkable experience and his commitment to defending those too often abandoned by our legal system." The same announcement named Steven Banks as corporation counsel, heading the city's Law Department, and Helen Arteaga Landaverde as deputy mayor for health and human services. As chief counsel, Kassem represents the mayor's side of City Hall in his official capacity, a role distinct from the corporation counsel's.

In a statement, Kassem said the city would be "on the front lines" as the federal government threatened civil rights, adding: "We will not allow fear, cruelty, or authoritarianism to take root in our city." At the press conference he said he had grown up in war-torn countries in the Middle East and saw the post as an opportunity to repay a debt to the city that had become his first permanent home.

Role

Kassem advises Mamdani on a near-daily basis, and his team drafted each of the mayor's first sixty-plus executive orders. He counseled the mayor before his meeting with President Donald Trump and proposed that Mamdani present the president with a list of five Columbia students detained by immigration authorities; one of them, Ellie Aghayeva, was released by ICE that afternoon. He later helped arrange a dinner at Gracie Mansion between the mayor and Khalil, one year after Khalil's arrest.

In April 2026 he worked with Mamdani on the mayor's first veto of New York City Council legislation, concerning two bills that would have restricted protests near houses of worship and schools; Mamdani signed the first and vetoed the second. Kassem has also participated in policing briefings, including one following the fatal police shooting of Jabez Chakraborty, a 22-year-old man with schizophrenia in Queens, where he questioned why police officials had introduced body-camera translations of the family's private conversations.

Kassem has described his approach as speaking his mind rather than muting himself, and has said he entered the job prepared for each day to be his last. He does not use social media and appears publicly only sparingly.

Financial disclosures

In July 2026, Politico reported on Kassem's annual financial disclosure, obtained from the New York City Conflicts of Interest Board. The form lists value ranges rather than exact amounts, and put his directly held stocks at between $181,000 and $1.56 million in total. The holdings included between $1,000 and $5,000 in the defense contractor RTX, which supplies weapons to the Israeli military. Politico contrasted this with Kassem's long record of criticizing Israel, including a 2002 column in the Columbia Daily Spectator. Other holdings were in the oil companies ExxonMobil and Chevron and the tobacco companies British American Tobacco and Philip Morris. He also held shares in National Grid, Verizon, and Microsoft, all of which held city contracts.

Mamdani spokesperson Dora Pekec said Kassem had not known that his financial adviser had bought RTX stock and would divest from it. She did not say whether he would sell any other holdings. Pekec added that Kassem evaluates recusal from matters involving companies with city business case by case. Rachael Fauss of the watchdog group Reinvent Albany noted that Kassem had not placed his investments in a blind trust. She said recusals were important given how broad the chief counsel's role is. Kassem did not respond to Politico's request for comment.

Reception and criticism

Mamdani has praised Kassem's record, saying he "has fought to ensure that justice is extended to everyone and not simply reserved for the powerful." Conservative outlets characterized him at the time of his appointment as an "ex-al Qaeda lawyer" on the basis of his defense of al-Darbi.

Members of the police department have objected to what they regard as his antagonism toward the NYPD, and some Jewish leaders have questioned his focus on protecting Jewish New Yorkers; Mark Goldfeder of the National Jewish Advocacy Center said the administration's "legal compass is now pointed in an activist direction." Reihan Salam of the Manhattan Institute argued that appointing a lawyer for whom opposition to Israel had been a defining commitment signaled the administration's priorities. Randy Mastro, a former deputy mayor under Eric Adams and Rudolph Giuliani, drew a distinction between courtroom advocacy and counseling inside City Hall.

September 11 anniversary ceremony

On September 4, 2026, ahead of the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Mamdani gathered staff at City Hall to sign two executive orders honoring victims, first responders, and survivors. The orders established the city's first Day of Remembrance and Service and called on residents and city agencies to mark September 11 through volunteering and reflection. Mamdani signed with multiple pens and distributed them to aides, passing one to New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch with a request that she hand it to Kassem, who had arrived late and, according to The Washington Times, appeared to smirk as he took it.

Video of the handoff circulated widely over the following weekend. State Assemblyman Kalman Yeger called the gesture "sick," and Joyce Cohen Day, whose mother died in the south tower, said Mamdani had deliberately given a pen "to an al Qaeda lawyer." Republican City Council members Joann Ariola and Vicki Paladino also condemned Kassem's presence. The episode followed a petition, organized by Giovanni Galante, whose wife died in the attacks, urging Mamdani to stay away from the ground zero ceremony on September 11; it had gathered more than 99,000 signatures. Mamdani's office said Kassem attended because he and his team had drafted both executive orders in the ordinary course of his duties as chief counsel.

Personal life

Kassem lives in Harlem. He is unmarried and has no children. Since 2023 he has been in a relationship with Darializa Avila Chevalier, a sociology doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center who in 2026 defeated incumbent Adriano Espaillat in the Democratic primary for a House seat covering Upper Manhattan and the Bronx. The two met in 2019 through immigrant-defense work, and Avila Chevalier confirmed the relationship publicly in July 2026. Mamdani's office said the mayor had long been aware of the relationship.

Honors

Kassem is an elected member of the American Law Institute. In 2020 he was named to the inaugural class of Freedom Scholars, selected nationwide in recognition of work toward social, racial, and economic justice. He is a non-resident fellow of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, an honorary fellow of the Foreign Policy Association, and a Paul & Daisy Soros New American Fellow.

See also

• Mayoralty of Zohran Mamdani

External links

• Official website
• SSRN author page