Progressive campaign organization Justice Democrats added a fifth fighter to its lineup of primary challengers today. She’s a community organizer whose babies-not-bombs platform speaks to widespread rage and sorrow over Israel’s genocide in Palestine.
“It’s not a symbolic thing for us,” Darializa Avila Chevalier said of the genocide. “It’s affecting our day-to-day,” because the taxpayer money spent funding bombs for Israel to drop on Gaza could be spent to improve the lives of those in her district, where poverty rates are some of the highest in New York City.
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Chevalier, 31, is running in New York’s 13th Congressional District, an area that covers Upper Manhattan, including Harlem, and parts of the West Bronx. She’s been organizing this area since she was a teen, including successfully overseeing the removal of a Central Park statue of the sadistic 19th-century gynecologist J. Marion Sims and working to free New Yorkers from illegal immigration detention. She currently works as an investigator at the legal organization Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem.
Standing with Palestine signals that a candidate’s moral compass is intact, Chevalier said. It also squares with what most Americans believe after two years of the nonstop bloodbath. Roughly 6 in 10 Americans of all parties view the Israeli government unfavorably, according to recent polling from Pew Research. A third say the U.S. government is sending Israel too much military assistance, and more than a third said it’s not sending enough humanitarian aid to Gaza. As my colleague Harold Meyerson wrote months ago, Democratic voters are severely opposed to the genocide, making Chevalier’s stance a winning position that all Democratic candidates should adopt.
Justice Democrats’ primary challengers are targeting safe Democratic seats and attempting to capitalize on the changing politics of Israel.
“Someone who chooses to stand with life … that’s someone whose values will naturally be reflected in the policies they advocate for,” Chevalier said. “It doesn’t matter to me what office that is. It’s going to translate to the way people feel they can trust their representative to act in their interest and not in the interest of profit.”
Chevalier is the first candidate Justice Democrats has endorsed in New York this cycle, joining four other Squad hopefuls: former Missouri Rep. Cori Bush (MO-01), former Highland Park Neighborhood Council President Angela Gonzales-Torres (CA-34), Michigan State Rep. Donavan McKinney (MI-13), and Tennessee State Rep. Justin J. Pearson (TN-09). The organization’s executive director, Alexandra Rojas, said Chevalier would bring “progressive, working-class leadership with moral clarity” to D.C.
“From defending families against ICE and leading programs to help New Yorkers afford their subway fares to mobilizing students and neighbors against Israel’s genocide, Darializa has been organizing in her community since she was a teenager and supporting New Yorkers on some of the hardest days of their lives,” Rojas said in a statement.
Chevalier is challenging incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, 71, who has held his position since 2017. Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, represents one of the most Democratic districts in the country; he overwhelmingly won re-election last year with 83.5 percent of the vote against a Republican challenger.
Espaillat is a member of the Progressive Caucus, but Chevalier has criticized him for coziness with big-money interests in his district and adherence to the pro-Israel line throughout the war in Gaza.
During his long tenure, Espaillat’s district has grown so expensive that younger people and families can no longer afford to live there. It is home to some of the highest rates of poverty in the city, with up to 40 percent of residents in some neighborhoods living below the poverty line, according to the Institute for Children, Poverty, and Homelessness. Nearly 90 percent of those who live there are renters, yet Espaillat has favored his real estate interests instead of addressing the cost of living, such as by allegedly manipulating a bidding process for a major development project so that it went to one of his donors, an instance that earned him an ethics complaint.
Chevalier’s advocacy in Congress would help alleviate that pressure, she said, because she would propose policies to invest in infants, renters, and immigrants.
“As an organizer a lot of my work has been framed around a model of invest and divest. I think budgets are moral documents; they tell us what we value,” she said. At the moment, our moral document is invested in the war machine, “when it should be investing in our people.”
Espaillat’s top contributor in 2023-2024 was the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, according to Open Secrets. His second-biggest donor was Columbia University, Chevalier’s alma mater, where former president and baroness Minouche Shafik used New York City Police officers last year to suppress students protesting the school’s complicity in Israeli apartheid. Chevalier was a lead organizer of alumni at the Columbia encampment in 2023 and 2024 and was an organizer and advocate for her friend Mahmoud Khalil when the Trump administration abducted him from his apartment building.
When federal agents kidnapped him, “there was the initial shock of it happening to someone I know and who I consider a friend,” Chevalier said. “But also there was a deeper understanding, a level of understanding of this being the natural progression a fascist, authoritarian-type government would take.”
It was a harrowing experience, she said, for Khalil and everyone who knows him. The way she dealt with it was to rally, organize direct actions, and demand his release. That’s the energy she’s planning to bring to D.C. After all, action really is the antidote to despair, she said.
“I find a lot of hope in organizing,” Chevalier said. So after she set aside her initial shock, “my organizer brain kicked in and said, ‘Let’s do something here.’”
Justice Democrats’ primary challengers are targeting safe Democratic seats and attempting to capitalize on the changing politics of Israel, after a cycle in which AIPAC and its allies used prodigious sums of campaign cash to put their favored candidates into office and even defeat sitting House Democrats like Bush. This year, former AIPAC-endorsed candidates have rejected their funding and voted against their policies, and the annual AIPAC trip of freshman House Democrats to Israel was one of the smallest in recent memory.
“AIPAC is now definitively a toxic pariah in the Democratic Party,” announced the Reject AIPAC coalition in August.