NEW YORK (AP) — Rama Duwaji, the wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, has apologized for “harmful” social media posts she made as a teenager, responding publicly after a conservative news outlet combed through her online profiles and resurfaced material, including a post in which she used an anti-gay slur.
In an interview with the arts website Hyperallergic, Duwaji, an illustrator, said she felt “a lot of shame being confronted with language I used that is so harmful to others," adding “being 15 doesn't excuse it."
"I’ve read and seen a lot of what others have had to say in response, and I understand the hurt I caused and am truly sorry," she said in the interview, published Wednesday, in response to a question about adjusting to life as a public figure.
Duwaji did not specify which comments she was referring to, nor did she address other, more recent social media activity regarding Israel that has attracted heavy scrutiny as Mamdani tries to ease concerns among some in the city's Jewish community over his own criticism of Israel's treatment of Palestinians.
Last month, The Washington Free Beacon reported on years of Duwaji’s online activity across a handful of social media platforms, finding she had shared posts praising female Palestinian militants who participated in plane hijackings and bombings in the 1960s and early 1970s. In 2015, she shared a post in which someone else wrote that Tel Aviv was occupying Palestinian land and “shouldn’t exist.”
Duwaji also once used a racial slur for Black people while affectionately addressing a friend and used an abbreviated slur for gay people in 2013.
The mayor has previously said his wife is a “private person” who does not hold a formal position in City Hall. Asked Thursday about which specific posts his wife regretted, Mamdani demurred.
“She shared some of her reflections in this interview. I won’t add much to them, what I will say, however, is that she is someone of incredible integrity,” Mamdani told reporters.
He added that questions about Duwaji's social media activity were “part and parcel” of his own choice to run for mayor, “a decision that has ramifications for those that I love.”
Separately, Duwaji has also come under criticism for liking an Instagram post that appeared to cheer Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023 surprise attack on Israel. The Free Beacon has also reported that Duwaji provided an illustration for an essay by an author who described the Oct. 7 attack as “spectacular" and had called Jewish Israelis “rootless soulless ghouls.”
Mamdani has previously said his wife had been commissioned to illustrate an excerpt of a book by a third party, and said she had never engaged or met with the author, and that Duwaji had not seen the author's previous comments. He called the author's rhetoric “patently unacceptable” and “reprehensible.”
AP writer Jake Offenhartz contributed
FILE - Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, right, and his wife, Rama Duwaji, react to supporters during an election night watch party, Nov. 4, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura, File)
New York will lose more than $73.5 million in federal money because the Transportation Department said Thursday that state has refused to revoke nearly 33,000 questionable commercial driver's licenses for immigrants since an audit uncovered problems last year.
The department said that more than half of the 200 licenses reviewed during the audit had significant problems such as remaining valid long after an immigrant was authorized to be in the country. So the state was ordered to review all of this type of licenses and revoke illegal ones.
The federal government has reviewed records related to these non-domiciled CDLs in every state since Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy put a spotlight on this issue after an August crash in Florida that killed three people. Most states have either complied or are in negotiations with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, but California has lost $200 million. Several other states — including Pennsylvania, Minnesota and North Carolina — have been warned they are at risk of losing some funding.
“I promised the American people I would hold any state leader accountable for failing to keep them safe from unvetted, unqualified foreign drivers. I’m delivering on that promise today,” Duffy said.
Duffy has said that immigrants account for about 20% of all truck drivers nationwide, but these non-domiciled licenses immigrants can receive only represent about 5% of all commercial driver’s licenses or about 200,000 drivers. New York issued 32,606 of them.
New York officials have defended their licensing practices and said they are complying with federal law and that audits done during the first Trump administration supported that. Duffy also has threatened to pull federal funding from New York if it does not abandon a congestion pricing fee in New York City and if crime on the subway system is not addressed.
Gov. Kathy Hochul's spokesman Sean Butler said the action related to commercial driver's licenses seems to be part of broad effort to attack blue states.
“This continues a yearlong pattern of Secretary Duffy threatening to withhold money that keeps our roads, subways, and other infrastructure safe for New Yorkers. We will fight back, and once again we will win,” Butler said.
Trucking industry groups have praised the Transportation Department's efforts to get unqualified drivers off the road, crack down on questionable trucking schools and go after trucking companies that violate the rules and then just change their names and keep operating. The industry said that too often unqualified drivers who shouldn’t have licenses or can’t speak English have been allowed to get behind the wheel of an 80,000-pound (about 39,916 kilograms) truck.
But immigrant groups say that some drivers are now being unfairly targeted. The spotlight has been on Sikh truckers because the driver in the Florida crash and the driver in another fatal crash in California in October are both Sikhs.
FILE - New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York Governor Kathy Hochul arrive at a press conference at Sugar Hill Children's Museum of Art & Storytelling, March 3, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura, File)
