New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been shielding criminal illegal aliens from ICE since the day he took office.
Now the candidate he’s backing for Congress just said the quiet part out loud.
And what she told a national podcast audience about deporting convicted murderers and child rapists will leave you absolutely stunned.
The Candidate Who Thinks Convicted Killers Deserve a Pass
Darializa Avila Chevalier is challenging U.S. Representative Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) in the Democrat primary for New York’s 13th Congressional District, which covers Harlem and parts of the Bronx. She’s a doctoral student at the City University of New York, a Democratic Socialist, and she was recruited to run by Justice Democrats — the same outfit that launched Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into Congress back in 2018.
She is also, as of this writing, leading in the polls.
In a recent podcast interview with Vox Media’s Astead Herndon, Chevalier reaffirmed her position that deportation is always wrong — no exceptions. When Herndon pushed her on whether that included illegal aliens who had been convicted of violent crimes in the United States, she held her ground.
“That phrase, yes, I still believe that all deportations are wrong,” Chevalier said.
Herndon pressed further. “If we’re saying that all deportation is wrong, that would seem to also include people who were convicted of breaking U.S. criminal law,” he told her. “Is the deportation of those people wrong?”
Her answer was something else. Chevalier suggested that deporting a convicted violent criminal would actually be discriminatory — against the criminal — because they’d be subjected to both the criminal justice system and the immigration system.
“The reason I say that is because we have a criminal system, it is imperfect, but it exists, and it is one that if we accept as the process by which we want to engage with these issues, right, the issues of harm, the issues of criminality… then we need to make sure that it is one that isn’t also discriminatory on the basis of where people were born,” Chevalier said.
She went further. “To subject someone who has committed a crime to both a criminal system but also an immigration system that also detains them in the very same facilities that criminal detainees… people who are convicted of criminal convictions are also held, and then deported and ripped away from everything they know and love, that is also a punishment and that is a punishment not on the basis of the crime they committed, because they already served their time… it is double punishment.”
Read that again. A person who rapes a child or commits murder in the United States — an illegal alien who had no legal right to be here in the first place — would, in Chevalier’s telling, be a victim of discrimination if the country they violated chose to remove them after their prison sentence ended.
Mamdani’s Fingerprints Are All Over This
Chevalier’s campaign carries the endorsement of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has made protecting criminal illegal aliens a signature cause of his administration. Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security condemned Mamdani for signing an executive order that turned New York City into what DHS described as “a shield for violent criminal illegal aliens to reoffend and create more innocent victims.”
At the time DHS issued that statement, there were 7,113 illegal aliens in New York jurisdictions with active ICE detainers. The crimes those individuals had been charged with or convicted of included 148 homicides, 717 assaults, 260 sexual predatory offenses, and 152 weapons offenses, according to DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin.
“Secretary Noem and ICE leadership are urgently calling on Mamdani to agree to release criminals in New York City’s custody to ICE before they are released back onto the Big Apple’s streets to victimize and prey on more Americans,” McLaughlin said.
Mamdani ignored that. And now the candidate he’s actively boosting for Congress is on tape arguing that deporting those same people — after they’ve served time for rape or murder — constitutes discrimination.
This is not a fringe position that slipped out in an unguarded moment. Chevalier has been consistent about it. She wants to abolish ICE entirely, telling NPR that “we can all go back to a world where ICE doesn’t exist and never exists again.” She was a lead organizer on Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. The two are ideologically aligned, and Mamdani’s endorsement is not incidental — he cut an ad for her campaign.
What This Actually Means
The Democrat Party has spent years insisting it only wants to protect “law-abiding” illegal aliens and that it supports removing those who commit violent crimes. That talking point has always been at least partially hollow, since every illegal alien broke the law by entering America, but candidates like Chevalier have stopped pretending entirely.
And she’s not some gadfly running a protest campaign. According to recent polling conducted for Justice Democrats by Data for Progress, Chevalier leads Espaillat 39 to 35 among likely primary voters in the district. She outraised every other challenger to an incumbent in New York City during the first quarter of 2026. House Democrat Leader Hakeem Jeffries is backing Espaillat, which tells you something about how seriously the Democrat establishment is taking the threat she poses.
But the establishment’s concern isn’t really about the “all deportations are wrong” position. Espaillat himself has voted for years to defund and dismantle ICE, fought deportations in court, and co-sponsored legislation to gut immigration enforcement. The difference between him and Chevalier is mostly one of tone and degree — not principle.
The deeper issue is what the Democrat Party’s open-borders wing is actually proposing. If deportation is off the table even for illegal aliens who murder or rape children, then there is no immigration enforcement left at all. A person who enters the country illegally, kills someone, serves their sentence, and then walks free in the United States — that is the logical end point of “all deportations are wrong.” Chevalier said it plainly. Most of her party’s members believe it but won’t say so.
New York voters in the 13th District will have a chance to weigh in on this shortly. The Democrat primary is scheduled for June 23, 2026. Whatever the result, the fact that this position is competitive — that a candidate holding it is leading in the polls with the backing of the city’s mayor — tells you where a significant chunk of the Democrat Party actually stands on criminal illegal aliens.
And it isn’t anywhere close to where the rest of the country stands.
Sources: Breitbart, Vox Media/Astead Herndon podcast interview, U.S. Department of Homeland Security press release, Semafor, AM New York, Ballotpedia, Wikipedia