The Department of Justice’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, Harmeet Dhillon, is warning New York’s Democratic mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani, that his policy proposal to “shift” the city’s property tax burden to “richer and whiter neighborhoods” is an “illegal discriminatory scheme” and could prompt an investigation.

In a statement to a right-wing commentator, Benny Johnson, during his live YouTube show, Ms. Dhillon said Mr. Mamdani’s race-based tax policy would violate the law. “Racial discrimination is illegal in the United States — period. Full stop. The illegal discriminatory scheme described by Mamdani would violate federal constitutional and statutory norms, and might even violate New York law,” she said.

A 33-year-old Democratic Socialist state assemblyman, Mr. Mamdani won the Democratic mayoral primary last Tuesday, beating the favored frontrunner, Governor Cuomo. Since then, Mr. Mamdani’s far-left policy platform has been coming under closer scrutiny.

In addition to promising free buses, free childcare, and a rent freeze on stabilized apartments — paid for, Mr. Mamdani says, by taxing the rich, increasing the corporate tax rate, and hiring more auditors to ferret out as much revenue as possible — he is also proposing a reworking of the property tax code. He calls varying property tax rates a “deeply inequitable system.”

“Shift the tax burden from overtaxed homeowners in the outer boroughs to more expensive homes in richer and whiter neighborhoods,” the Mamdani platform says. “The property tax system is unbalanced because assessment levels are artificially capped, so homeowners in expensive neighborhoods pay less than their fair share.”

Mr. Mamdani won’t be able to implement any of these proposals unless he wins the general election in November. The Democratic nominee is usually favored to win in New York City, though this year could be different with a nominee with such radical ideas and a crowded field of independent candidates, including the incumbent mayor.

When contacted by the Sun about a potential civil rights investigation into Mr. Mamdani, the Office of Civil Rights responded, “No comment.”

President Trump also sent a warning to Mr. Mamdani over the weekend, saying the city’s federal funding could be at stake if he tries to carry out some of his more left-wing ideas. “If he does get in, I’m going to be president, and he has to do the right thing or they’re not getting any money,” Mr. Trump said. 

Since taking the helm of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, Ms. Dhillon has shifted its focus away from enforcing decades old consent decrees and broadened the scope of the types of discrimination it targets for investigation. Among these new priorities are protecting religious liberty — specifically anti-Christian bias — protecting women’s rights from transgender accommodations, prosecuting antisemitism, and protecting the Second Amendment.

Critics of Ms. Dhillon say that the division was created to enforce laws against discrimination of Blacks and other minority groups, and that Ms. Dhillon is “flipping the mission on its head.” Ms. Dhillon’s usual response to this is that it’s 2025 and the face of discrimination in this country has changed.

Ms. Dhillon is also taking seriously anti-white and anti-Asian discrimination. Last month, she opened an investigation into the city of Chicago after its mayor, Brandon Johnson, bragged at a Black church that most of his top administration positions are filled by Black men and women.

“Our investigation is based on information that you have made hiring decisions solely on the basis of race,” Ms. Dhillon wrote in a letter to Mr. Johnson following his remarks.

Mr. Mamdani’s property tax proposal is framed on his website as targeting white homeowners, but wide variations in property tax rates has been a concern of Democrats and Republicans in the city for years. Property taxes in Staten Island or parts of Queens can be four times what they are in Brooklyn neighborhoods along the East River — areas that are now much wealthier, though that wasn’t necessarily the case when the rates were set.

“Mamdani’s ‘raise white people’s property tax’ is actually the same plan I pushed for over a decade,” former city council minority leader, Joe Borelli, a Republican, posted to X. “Turns out it’s not all white folks…not even close. Just the annoying insufferable wokesters that live in multi-million $ homes in places like park slope,” he said about those whose property taxes would rise under the Mamdani plan.

“It’s not driven by race,” Mr. Mamdani said on NBC over the weekend, defending his tax plan. “I think I’m just naming things as they are.”