Amir Khafagy

Amir Khafagy is an award-winning New York City-based journalist. He is currently the Senior Labor Reporter with Documented NY. Much of Amir's beat explores the intersections of labor, race, class, immigration, and urban policy.


His writing has been featured in The Guardian, Vice, The New Republic, New York Mag, The City, Bloomberg, Prism, Documented, The Appeal, Dame, The American Prospect, Jacobin, and In These Times. Additionally, Amir has worked as a researcher for the critically acclaimed podcast Serial. 

Previously, Amir was a Report for America Corps member. He has been awarded the 2022 LION Local Journalism Accountability Award, Type Investigations 2021 Ida B. Wells Fellowship, The Sidney Hillman Foundation's Reporting the U.S. Workplace Program, The Newmark J-School 2021 Education Reporting Scholarship, The International Center for Journalists COVID-19 Reporting Award, The New Economics Reporting Fellowship, The Economic Hardship Reporting Grant, The Talk Poverty Writer Workshop Fellowship, The Asian American Writers Workshop Open City Fellowship, and The AARP Freelance Fellowship. 



Amir holds a BA in Urban Studies and an MA in Urban Affairs from Queens College. 


As a performer, Amir has appeared in Ping Chong & Company's Beyond Sacred: Voices of Muslim Identity. He has also appeared in Gun Country, a Houses on the Moon theatre company production.

A lifelong New Yorker, Amir was born and raised in Jackson Heights, Queens, into a working-class, Muslim, immigrant family. His mother is Puerto Rican, and his father is an immigrant from Egypt. Follow him on Twitter @AmirKhafagy91

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Mamdani’s First ‘Rental Ripoff’ Hearing Brings Hope and Skepticism

On Thursday night, over 200 tenants crowded into a Brooklyn high school gymnasium, carrying a list of grievances against their landlords. Having survived bouts of harassment, vermin infestations, and dangerous living conditions, tenants were eager to sound off at the Mamdani administration’s first “Rental Ripoff” hearing. Held at George Westinghouse High School in Downtown Brooklyn, the event was advertised as an opportunity for tenants to engage in one-on-one conversations with City officials. Through those conversations, slated to be held in all five boroughs, tenants would be able to shape the city’s future housing policy.
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Delivery Worker Union Leader Injured on the Job - Documented

Dinner is a busy time for delivery workers. For Uber Eats delivery worker and Los Deliveristas Unidos co-founder William Medina, the evening of Feb. 5 started as a typical evening before it took a dangerous turn.  Juggling multiple orders in the subzero temperatures, Medina, a 41-year-old immigrant from Colombia, had just picked up yet another order from the popular 7th Street Burger in Astoria on his moped.
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“Stabbed us in the back”: Nurses Reject Union-Brokered Deal to End Strike - Documented

The longest nurses’ strike in the city’s history is going to be even longer. In a surprising turn, striking nurses from NewYork-Presbyterian overwhelmingly rejected a deal struck by their own union, the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA).  On Wednesday evening, more than 70% of the nearly 4,200 striking nurses at NewYork-Presbyterian voted against a tentative contract brokered by their union that would have brought the nurses back to work after 31 days on strike.
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Mahoma López Garfias, Labor Leader of the Laundry Workers Center, Dies at 47

Commenting on the transformative power organizing had on immigrant farm laborers working in California’s lush grape fields, legendary Mexican-American labor leader Cesar Chavez said, “If a man comes out of the field and goes on the picket line, even for one day, that man will never be the same.” That quote could best describe the life of another labor leader: Mahoma López Garfias, who died Jan. 28 at the age of 47 after a long battle with cancer. From 2015 until his death, Garfias served as the co-executive director of the Laundry Workers Center (LWC), a grassroots nonprofit that organizes immigrant workers.
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The Hands That Feed New York in the Cold - Documented

Over a foot of snow engulfed New York City on Jan. 25, nearly grinding the city to a halt. This past weekend, temperatures across the five boroughs once again plunged, with at least 16 people succumbing to the bitter cold. Even as the mountains of snow and ice piled up along city sidewalks and many New Yorkers sheltered indoors, food delivery workers braved the frigid weather. Their bikes, scooters, and mopeds slid across the icy streets like dogless snowsleds during the Iditarod race.
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Mayor Mamdani Announces Multimillion-Dollar Delivery Worker Wage Theft Settlement

More than two years after New York implemented its historic minimum wage rate for delivery workers, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced on Friday a multimillion-dollar settlement with three restaurant delivery app companies for widespread violation of the law. Uber Eats, Fantuan, and HungryPanda will pay nearly $5.2 million combined in restitution, civil penalties and damages to more than 49,000 delivery workers who failed to receive the mandated minimum wage since December 2023, when the law was implemented.
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Maduro’s Arrest Brings Back Memories of Venezuela’s Helping Hand to the South Bronx

President Donald Trump’s abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro earlier this month brought a mix of cheers and outrage from segments of Venezuelan immigrant communities. Sixteen miles away from where Maduro now sits in a Brooklyn jail cell as he awaits trial, residents of the South Bronx are feeling another emotion: nostalgia over the legacy of aid Venezuela provided them when they were most in need.
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One Year After Trump Vowed to Make America Great Again, Report Finds Workers Are Less Safe

One year into President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, workers’ rights advocates are sounding the alarm on the erosion of workplace safety laws. A recent report published by Good Jobs First, a national policy resource center that promotes corporate and government accountability, found that under the second Trump Administration, there has been a significant drop in the federal enforcement of wage and workplace safety regulations. Simply put, under Trump, much less is being done to protect workers on the job.
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Mamdani Vows to Bring Taxi Workers’ Movement Into City Hall With Taxi and Limousine Commission Pick

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani tapped a longtime transit official to head the Taxi and Limousine Commission, a move meant to assure drivers that they will be represented in City Hall Surrounded by dozens of yellow cab drivers outside of LaGuardia Airport on Tuesday, the mayor announced that he was nominating transportation policy leader Midori Valdivia as chair and commissioner of the TLC, the city agency tasked with regulating the city’s for-hire vehicle industry.   Valdivia’s record...
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Migrant Workers Win Farm Union Contract, Protecting Them From H-2A Visa Wage Cuts

Seasonal migrant farm workers at an upstate New York apple orchard are entering the new year with new labor protections under a hard-won union contract, the second such farm union contract in upstate New York history.    Workers organizing with the United Farm Workers (UFW) won the contract after a yearslong legal battle with Wafler Farms, an apple producer in Wayne County. Workers had initially certified their union in 2023, but Wafler Farms sued to block the workers from organizing. A Wayne...
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Court Orders State Agency to Reopen Home Care Workers’ Wage Theft Complaints

Immigrant home care workers who have spent nearly a decade fighting to win back pay for stolen wages are starting their new year off with renewed hope. On Jan. 2, the New York Supreme Court ruled that the New York State Department of Labor must reopen hundreds of wage theft cases that were closed by the agency.  “This is a victory not only for union workers, but for all home care workers, as it is a signal to all sweatshop bosses that the wages must be paid back immediately,” said Yolanda Zha...
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Miscarriage of Justice: Amazon Accused of Violating Pregnant Workers' Rights

It was December 2024, and Libyan immigrant Hayat Bzezi, 33, was working vigorously at Amazon’s sprawling Staten Island warehouse to keep up with the seemingly endless stream of packages flowing down the conveyor belt that she had to stack and prepare to ship. The holiday season is the busiest time of year for Amazon workers, where workers are required to provide Mandatory Extra Time (MET), adding an additional full 10-hour shift to their weekly schedules. Three months pregnant, Hayat struggle...
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