July 3 (UPI) — New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani recounted the city’s history with immigration and praised “righteous dissent” in a televised address marking the Unites States’ 250th anniversary.

The first-term Democrat delivered his speech Friday while seating behind President George Washington’s desk at New York City Hall. The mayor, who was born in Uganda and became a U.S. citizen in 2018, was flanked by recently-naturalized U.S. citizens as he made his remarks.

“This will be no ordinary day of celebration,” Mamdani said. “Two hundred fifty years presents a rare opportunity for more than 340 million people to turn together, both toward one another and toward ourselves, to take measure of who we are as a nation.”

The mayor recounted New York’s historic role as a hub of immigration.

“Hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants arrived with stomachs aching from a famine manufactured by imperial cruelty,” he said. “Chinese sailors settled in what is today Chinatown. Millions more traveled under the Statue of Liberty and through Ellis Island. Jewish people escaping pogroms, Italians fleeing poverty. Syrians seeking economic opportunity.”

The speech appeared to take aim at previous anti-immigration remarks by President Donald Trump.

“For generation after generation, we have been told that when the world has sent its people to our shores, it has not sent its best,” he said.

Mamdani offered his own perspective on the idea of “American exceptionalism.”

“We are told that America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else. The truth, my friends, is that America is exceptional, because here nothing is fixed into place,” he said.

He also praised protesters who took to the streets “as ICE invades our neighborhoods,” describing them as patriotic.

“Patriotism is every act of righteous dissent. It is every march led under the heavy sun. It is every protest held a decade before its time. It is precisely because we love this nation that we will not leave it. After all, who loves America more than those who have sacrificed so much to make it free?” Mamdani said.

Trump is expected to give his own speech marking the country’s 250th anniversary later Friday at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.