Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City made an unannounced trip to Washington on Thursday to meet with President Trump, and suggested afterward that they had found common ground around building more housing in New York.
Mr. Mamdani also said he had secured a promise that federal immigration agents would release a Columbia University undergraduate they had arrested early Thursday morning.
“He has just informed me that she will be released imminently,” Mr. Mamdani wrote on social media, referring to the student, Elmina Aghayeva, a senior from Azerbaijan.
The two men come from opposite ends of the political spectrum, but have managed to build a personal rapport, particularly around a shared interest in housing in their hometown.
Mr. Trump first made his name in real estate in New York City. Mr. Mamdani ran for office on a platform of making the city more affordable, in part by building more housing.
“I had a productive meeting with President Trump this afternoon,” Mr. Mamdani wrote on X, alongside of a photo of him standing next to a grinning Mr. Trump in the Oval Office.
In the photo, Mr. Trump is pictured holding two printouts of New York Daily News front pages, one real and one fake.
The printout he is holding in his left hand shows a real front page from 1975, with the infamous headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” published after President Gerald Ford refused to bail out New York City, which was nearing bankruptcy.
The fake front page, which Mr. Trump holds in his other hand, reads “Trump to City: Let’s Build.”
In smaller type beneath that headline, the page reads “Backs New Era of Housing.” And in even smaller type, it reads “Trump Delivers 12,000+ Homes; Most Since 1973.”
Mr. Mamdani provided the printouts to Mr. Trump, a spokeswoman for City Hall said. She declined to elaborate further on any housing deal that had been reached.
Both Mr. Mamdani and Mr. Trump left the meeting off their public schedules. Mr. Mamdani evidently left the White House without addressing reporters there.
The New York Post first reported that Mr. Mamdani was traveling to Washington, though it did not say why.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Mamdani have established an unexpectedly amicable relationship despite vast political differences, and have found common ground on issues pertaining to land use in New York.
They first met in November, after Mr. Mamdani won the mayoral election. Though the mayor is a democratic socialist and Mr. Trump is a hard-right Republican, they exhibited a surprising level of good feeling during the meeting.
At the time, Mr. Trump expressed optimism about Mr. Mamdani’s coming mayoralty, and Mr. Mamdani voiced appreciation for the president’s willingness to discuss areas of overlapping concern.
During his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Mr. Trump said he spoke often to Mr. Mamdani and described him as a “nice guy,” even if he embraced “bad policy.”
He also criticized New York City’s use of volunteer emergency shovelers to help clean up after this week’s snowstorm. The city asked the shovelers to provide two forms of identification, a federal requirement that Republicans who support voter identification laws have nevertheless seized on as evidence of hypocrisy.
For his part, Mr. Mamdani has largely avoided directly criticizing Mr. Trump, who wields substantial control over federal funding streams that New York relies on. One deviation from that stance came in January, after the U.S. military’s capture of Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan leader, which Mr. Mamdani described as “an act of war and a violation of federal and international law.”
Mr. Mamdani also called Mr. Trump to express his objections at the time, a move that was said to have annoyed the president.
Jeffery C. Mays contributed reporting.
