N.Y. Socialist Called for Eliminating Police, Prisons, and Israel. Now, She’s Likely Headed to Congress
Even by the standards of the modern Democratic party, Harlem community organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier is extreme.
Read more Mamdani-Backed Socialists Sweep New York House Primaries
Chevalier, who won the Democratic primary for New York’s 13th congressional district on Tuesday, has advocated seizing the means of production, abolishing police, prisons, and borders, and supports the destruction of the state of Israel.
Avila Chevalier prevailed over incumbent Representative Adriano Espaillat, after receiving the support of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Avila Chevalier was one of two New York House candidates to be endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America; Claire Valdez, the second, also won her primary election on Tuesday night. Given the partisan make-up of New York City, Valdez and Chevalier are all but guaranteed to win their general elections in November and head to D.C.
While Espaillat is the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and a fixture in New York City Democratic circles, Avila Chevalier is a first-time candidate who was well known in Harlem for her pro-Palestinian activism, which she’s given voice to in extreme terms on social media.
CNN reported last month that Avila Chevalier’s now-deleted account on X included “thousands of posts and reposts expressing support for abolishing police, prisons and borders, as well as seizing private property and nationalizing major industries and calling into question Israel’s right to exist.”
Her biography on the platform previously included the phrase “how communist of you” and the hashtags “#BlackLivesMatter” and “#FreePalestine,” while her location was tagged as “Occupied Lenape Land.”
Several of Avila Chevalier’s posts showed a penchant for communism. In April 2020, she wrote that while most of the political theory she had read was communist, “the pyromania associated with anarchism is very intriguing to me.”
“Seize the means of production,” she wrote in 2019.
She was also adamant about completely abolishing the police, responding with malice toward users who tried to “water down” the movement.
When one user asked what a better slogan would be than “defund the police,” Avila Chevalier replied, “F*** you. We’re gonna defund and abolish. You don’t get to water down our movements.”
She also pushed back against claims that abolishing police meant ending policing only “as we know it.”
“No. It means ending policing full stop. Period. No more police at all ever,” she wrote.
She also reposted a message that read, “In New York they don’t say ‘I love you,’ they say ‘NYPD suck my d***’ and I think that’s beautiful.”
She expressed support for a “world without borders” or prisons or police, calling the idea “possible, necessary, and the only moral way forward” in September 2021. That same month, she said “all deportation is wrong.”
Avila Chevalier also suggested in 2020 that “Israel doesn’t exist!” and offered a few choice words for the Democratic Party when progressive Bernie Sanders ended his 2020 presidential campaign. She also wrote “F*** Kamala Harris” in 2021, after the then-vice president told Guatemalan migrants not to come to the United States illegally.
Mamdani, for his part, said he wasn’t aware of her past comments when he endorsed her, but he did not pull his endorsement nonetheless.
Read more Leader of Antifa Group Convicted in Texas ICE Facility Attack Sentenced to 100 Years in Prison
“In Congress, she’ll take on corporate greed, bad landlords, and D.C.’s broken political system. At a time when power is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, Darializa will fight in Congress for New York City’s working families. She’s the champion we need for a city New Yorkers can actually afford,” Mamdani told CNN.
Avila Chevalier, now a 32-year-old investigator at a public defender’s office in New York City and a doctoral student in sociology at the City University of New York studying “the ways Black immigrants from Latin America are impacted by the US criminal system and deportation,” told the outlet the posts do not reflect who she is today.
“My opponent wants to live in the past. He is re-litigating social media posts from half a decade ago, and continuing to champion an outdated politics that fails to serve our people,” Avila Chevalier said. “I have grown considerably since in the years since these tweets, and I am focused on our community and our community’s future.”
And yet as recently as 2023, she attended an “All Out for Palestine,” just one day after Hamas murdered 1,200 Israelis. Footage of the protest obtained by the Times of Israel showed Avila Chevalier wearing a keffiyeh beside a protester with a sign reading “Zionism is genocide.”
Some demonstrators at the event chanted “700,” referring to the then-known Israeli death toll, while others made throat-slitting gestures, made obscene gestures toward Jewish counter-protesters, and shouted “Globalize the Intifada,” according to the Combat Antisemitism Movement.
Avila Chevalier became involved in pro-Palestinian activism during her time at Columbia, where she joined Students for Justice in Palestine and helped found Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) in 2016. Avila Chevalier worked with CUAD as an alumna in 2024 to organize Columbia’s pro-Palestinian encampment.
CUAD previously wrote in a letter to university leadership clarifying its belief that “divestment is not an incrementalist goal.”
“True divestment,” the student activists wrote, “necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself. It is not possible for imperial spoils to remain so heavily concentrated in the metropole and its high-cultural repositories without the continuous suppression of all populations that resist the empire’s expansion; to divest from this is to undermine and eradicate America as we know it.”
The group further advocated for translating the “resilience” of the Palestinian people in Gaza “to unrest and violence in America.”
And in responding to protests in Bangladesh in 2024, the coalition advocated for the “total eradication” of Western civilization.
“We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization,” CUAD said in an Instagram post.
But while Avila Chevalier claims to have moved on from some of her most controversial social media takes, her campaign website still advanced a number of radical positions.
“We must end the genocide and occupation in Palestine, divest from Israeli apartheid, stop all funding to the Israeli government, and reinvest in us,” her website reads. She further advocates for abolishing ICE and increasing affordable housing in New York City.
Read more Al Jazeera Journalist Mourned by Mamdani Was Also Hamas Sniper, IDF Says
