New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani quietly hired a self-described communist who called for abolishing the police and signed a pro-Palestinian solidarity letter days after the October 7 attacks, and she scrubbed her social media before taking the job.
Lena Afridi joined the mayor's office in April 2026 as a senior adviser in the Office of the First Deputy Mayor, drawing a $185,000 annual salary paid by New York City taxpayers. Her appointment drew no public announcement from City Hall. The Washington Free Beacon reported that Afridi deleted her X account and scrubbed much of her social media history in the days before she arrived at City Hall, but the outlet recovered her deleted posts through web archives.
What those posts reveal is a years-long trail of radical public statements: calls to abolish the police, praise for a convicted bank robber and bomber, endorsements of communism, and a solidarity letter that declared Israel "an apartheid state" just days after Hamas murdered more than 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023.
On LinkedIn, Afridi described her new portfolio in one line: "I'll be working on responses to federal intervention in the Office of the First Deputy Mayor." That language points toward the city's ongoing resistance to federal immigration enforcement, a portfolio that would put a self-avowed police abolitionist at the center of New York's standoff with ICE.
Multiple administration sources told the Free Beacon they could not describe what Afridi actually does day to day. One unnamed official inside the Mamdani administration called her "a strange person."
Afridi's now-deleted X account, posted under the handle @lpafridi, laid out her political commitments in plain language. In June 2020, she wrote:
"On a personal note, outside of work: while I believe that defunding the NYPD is absolutely necessary in order to get much needed resources to the people, I *also* believe that the only way to achieve true liberation is not through reform but abolition of the police."
That was not a one-off. In September 2021, Afridi posted that "undoing capitalism" was the only way to stop climate change. In other posts from late 2019 and December 2021, she wrote approvingly about "communism" and "gay communism," per the archived posts the Free Beacon recovered.
Afridi is currently listed as an editor at Pinko magazine, which describes itself on its website as "a collective for thinking gay communism." An earlier version of the site's about page, captured by a web archive in November 2019, used cruder language to describe its mission. A 2019 blog post on the Pinko site defined the magazine's vision of communism as "the freedom not to have to seek our lives on the market, attained through the abolition of all forms of private property, family and the state."
Mamdani's administration has drawn repeated scrutiny for the ideological profile of its hires. His chief lawyer, Ramzi Kassem, previously represented al Qaeda detainees. His Brooklyn borough director, Álvaro López, called people who ripped down flyers of Israeli hostages "heroes." Another hire, Drashti Brahmbhatt, drew attention for extensive social media commentary hostile toward white women. And Mamdani's judicial screening panel sparked its own controversy over its composition and the records of its members.
Afridi fits the pattern.
In the immediate aftermath of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, the deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust, Afridi added her name to the "Writers Against the War on Gaza Statement of Solidarity." The letter declared:
"We stand with their anticolonial struggle for freedom and for self-determination, and with their right to resist occupation. Israel is an apartheid state, designed to privilege Jewish citizens at the expense of Palestinians."
The timing matters. The letter appeared days after the massacre, before Israel had launched its ground campaign in Gaza. Afridi was not merely criticizing Israeli military operations, she was endorsing a statement that framed the conflict as an "anticolonial struggle" and affirmed Palestinians' "right to resist occupation" while the bodies of 1,200 murdered Israelis were still being identified.
That stance aligns with Mamdani's own record on Israel. The mayor drew bipartisan condemnation from Israeli leaders for calling Prime Minister Netanyahu a "war criminal." His posture toward Israel grew so toxic that 9/11 families petitioned to bar him from the 25th anniversary ceremony at Ground Zero.
In a separate essay published in Acacia magazine, Afridi praised Aaron Bushnell, a U.S. airman who set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington to protest the war in Gaza, as someone who "died for truth" and is "venerated across the world." In the same essay, she noted she was taking the prescription antidepressant Wellbutrin.
Afridi spent three years as chief of staff at PowerSwitch Action before joining the administration. The organization describes itself as dedicated to "forging multiracial feminist democracy" and "grounded in breaking the interlocking chains of oppression."
In a March 2026 blog post, just weeks before Afridi moved to City Hall, PowerSwitch Action described its involvement in anti-ICE protests in Minnesota. The Free Beacon characterized the post as the group "openly bragging" about its role in those events.
Afridi's LinkedIn announcement that she would be "working on responses to federal intervention" suggests her portfolio may center on the city's resistance to federal immigration enforcement, the same cause her former employer was promoting. New York taxpayers are now paying $185,000 a year for a senior adviser whose prior organization claimed credit for opposing the same federal agents the city is resisting.
Mamdani's broader policy agenda has followed a similar trajectory. He launched a taxpayer-funded office to push unionization across the city and proposed a city-owned grocery plan that drew sharp pushback from the Small Business Administration.
In October 2021, Afridi posted a tribute to Rita "Bo" Brown, whom she called "a militant butch working class revolutionary and one of the founders of the George Jackson Brigade."
Brown was no folk hero. The George Jackson Brigade was a Marxist organization responsible for bombings and bank robberies across Washington and Oregon in the 1970s. The FBI arrested Brown in Seattle in 1977. The New York Times described her at the time as "a suspect in numerous bombings and bank robberies in Washington and Oregon." She pleaded guilty to firearms and bank robbery charges and received a 25-year prison sentence in 1979. She died in 2021.
Afridi's tribute made no mention of Brown's crimes. She framed the convicted bomber as a revolutionary worthy of public mourning.
In October 2019, Afridi also posted a broadside against Mahatma Gandhi: "Stop glorifying Gandhi. Gandhi was a racist anti-Black misogynist who referred to even S. Asian Muslims as aggressive bullies."
Afridi was born in Karachi, Pakistan, and grew up in a Muslim family in Flushing, Queens. She also goes by "L. Israh Afridi" on the Pinko masthead; "Israh" is Arabic for "night journey," a reference sacred in Islam. She uses "they/them" pronouns.
Before arriving at City Hall, Afridi deleted her X account and scrubbed much of her public social media trail. The move suggests awareness that her record would draw scrutiny, and a calculation that deleting the posts would be enough to avoid it.
It wasn't. The Free Beacon recovered the deleted posts through web archives. Neither Afridi nor the Mamdani administration responded to the outlet's inquiries.
Cea Weaver, described as a close friend of Afridi and a top Mamdani housing official, has her own record of inflammatory statements, including calling home ownership "a weapon of white supremacy" and expressing a desire to "impoverish the white middle class." Mamdani's political adviser, Morris Katz, drew attention for attempting to include explicit personal photographs in a children's book about puberty. His advance man, Mathis E. Roy Vigne, became known for complaints about the quality of first-class airline travel on social media.
Afridi's hiring is not an isolated lapse in vetting. It is the latest entry in a pattern: Mamdani staffs his administration with ideological activists, pays them six-figure salaries from the city treasury, and bets that nobody will look too closely at what they said before they got the job. The bet keeps losing, but the hiring keeps going.
