“I am not OK with any deportation. I think all deportation is wrong,” Democratic Socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier declared in an interview last Thursday, hoping to become the Democratic Party’s candidate in New York’s 13th congressional district.
“I think that we just should not have a system that allows deportation to happen at all,” Chevalier, who is endorsed by Democratic Socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, said in an interview with The New York Editorial Board, in which she attributed all deportation to racism:
“I have yet to come up with a reason for why deportation has been used in a way that isn’t rooted in deeply racist ideology.”
Chevalier claimed that borders are nothing more than a “social system”:
“And, you know, when we talk about the border, a lot of people think about it as like a hard line in the sand, but really it is a system. It is like a social system that we’re engaging in, and more and more, it’s a militarized project. It’s one that is deeply dehumanizing to so many people.”
What’s more, deporting criminal illegal aliens is actually a form of “double jeopardy,” she argued when asked if “an individual who arrived here under the Biden open-borders policy and went on to commit a violent crime or series of nonviolent crimes” should “have a right to stay in the U.S. indefinitely”:
“To subject non-citizens to both the criminal system and then the deportation system is inherently double jeopardy on the basis of where someone was born, right?”
Chevalier, a self-vowed “prison abolitionist,” made the same “double jeopardy” claim last Tuesday during a primary debate as part of a broader condemnation of the nation’s justice system:
“It's an imperfect system. It's an imperfect criminal system that I've been critical of, but we have one. And if we truly believe in a system where we don't have double jeopardy on the basis of where someone was born, then we cannot also have a system of punishment that is unique to people who were born elsewhere.”
“And so what I have said time again is we have a system that is uh we're supposed to use to handle these issues of criminality and we cannot then add on top of that another system on the basis of where someone was born,” Chevalier added.
