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Notes -
Zohran Mamdani is threatening to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu when he visits the UN in September
18 USC 878 makes it a federal crime to threaten to imprison any foreign head of state, which suggests that the DOJ has grounds to take action against Mamdani here. This would, of course, cause absolutely nuclear levels of insanity to erupt, especially since I have very little faith in the media not to frame it as "Fascist Trump arrests political rival". But also, it's also extremely unlikely that there will be an actual attempt to arrest Netanyahu, since that would require the NYPD to tangle with the United States Secret Service. All of this seems obvious to me, which means it must be obvious to Mamdani, which raises the question, what is his play here? Even the suggestion that the city that hosts the UN would seriously consider arresting guests of the UN should be insanely problematic.
My reading of 18 USC 878 in connection with 18 USC 1201 is that it refers to illegal kidnappings only. The key operative word in 1201 is "unlawful".
Arrests by police are almost never so blatantly unlawful that we prosecute the police for kidnapping.
More generally, threatening to have someone arrested is not considered threatening a crime.
I think that the arrest of foreign officials wanted by entities outside the US is obviously a federal matter, and absent specific legislation from Congress entirely up to the executive. Obviously there are tradeoffs between diplomatic standards and enforcing international norms.
But if Trump did an 180 tomorrow and told Netanyahu that he is not welcome in the US and would be shipped to the Hague in he appeared on US soil, that would be entirely within his power.
But what about reading it in connection with 18 USC 112, which doesn't mention kidnappings and does mention "imprison" without any specification that it's not under color of law?
It's possible that "imprison" here is meant in the sense of the crime of "false imprisonment," which is the crime of hindering someone's movement without cause, but which does not require a literal prison.
But even in that sense, someone's arrest by law enforcement would also constitute "imprisoning" them.
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