New York City Councilwoman Vickie Paladino is once again in the hot seat as the City Council Ethics Committee charged her with disorderly behavior on March 3 for Islamophobic tweets she posted on her X account, one of which was directed at Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s chief immigration officer appointee, Linda Sarsour.
“New York is under foreign occupation. There’s really no other way to put it,” Paladino’s post responding to the appointment on Feb. 17 said. “Does this administration have one single actual American in it?”
Sarsour, a hijabi woman and pro-Palestinian activist, was born in Brooklyn and is an American citizen.
“The Committee on Rules, Privileges, Elections, Standards, and Ethics met on Monday and voted to charge Council Member Paladino with engaging in disorderly behavior and violating the Council’s Anti-Harassment and Discrimination Policy,” a spokesperson from the City Council wrote to QNS on Thursday. “The charge was based on Council Member Paladino’s conduct on social media.”
Paladino — a Republican representing District 19 communities including Whitestone, College Point, Bayside, Little Neck, Douglaston and parts of North Flushing — is given five days from the date charges were brought forward, March 3, to provide a written response.
She will then be scheduled in the coming weeks to appear before the committee in executive session.
According to council rules, disciplinary actions can vary, including censure, fines, removal of privileges, mandatory training, suspension or expulsion.
The disciplinary process will be conducted by the nine member committee and would need to be approved two-thirds of the 52-member City Council.
Paladino’s team has not responded to QNS’s request for further comment as of press time, but the councilwoman responded to the charges Tuesday evening on X, calling them an “unconstitutional scheme to violate [her] first amendment rights.”
She referred to her comments on social media as “political discourse in the public square” and claimed they were protected by the Constitution.
However, an ACLU fact sheet points out that the Constitution does not protect speech constituted as harassment, incitement, true threats or fighting words.
The ethics committee is specifically charging Paladino with harassment and discrimination.
Paladino is known for her incendiary posts on social media, which have targeted Muslims and other minority communities in the past.
In May 2024, she referred to students on college campuses protesting Israel bombing on Gaza as “monsters” and calling to “slay” them.
She also called for Mamdani, a naturalized American citizen since 2018, to be deported this past June, and was kicked off the Council’s Committee on Mental Health, Disabilities and Addiction in May 2023 after claiming Drag Story Hour NYC was “grooming” children and exposing them to “sexual content.”
Sarsour herself had called out Paladino in December for a tweet the councilwoman posted calling for the denaturalization and “expulsion of Muslims from western nations.”
Paladino’s tweet was in response to the antisemitic mass shooting at Bondi Beach in Australia during a Hanukkah celebration.
Users have since pointed out the irony that Ahmed al-Ahmed, a Muslim Australian citizen, helped detain the shooters.
“Welcome to the NYC Council,” Sarsour wrote on Facebook on Dec. 15. “Anyone working on censuring this woman or stripping her of any committee positions or is that only for Muslim women?”
Paladino has also accused popular Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, a Muslim man who covers leftist politics on the platform, of “telling his followers to make suicide drones.”
Piker swiftly responded to Paladino’s accusations on X saying, “be on the lookout for a defamation suit councilwoman!” just hours before she posted in response to the ethics committee charges.
