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Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old community organizer backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, ousted five-term Democratic incumbent Representative Adriano Espaillat in New York's 13th Congressional District primary on Tuesday.
Running on a platform that includes nationalizing large swaths of the private sector and abolishing deportations, Avila Chevalier secured a Democratic nomination in a district that has never returned a Republican to Congress — placing her general-election victory in November on near-certain footing.
A Record That Tested the Democratic Electorate Avila Chevalier, who studied at Columbia University and was a member of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest group — which later posted "Death to America" on its social media accounts — ran to the left of the party's established progressive wing, including former Vice President Kamala Harris and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
Posts from 2018 to 2022, many since deleted, showed her calling for the abolition of borders, prisons, and police, framing the move as "possible, necessary, and the only moral way forward." In a recent debate with Espaillat, she doubled down on her position that no undocumented person should be deported, even those who had committed violent crimes and served prison time.
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