New York socialist House candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier co-founded a pro-Hamas group that led protesters at Columbia University and called for “death to America.”
Chevalier, who won the Tuesday Democratic primary for New York’s 13th Congressional District, “helped launch” the radical group in 2016 as a Columbia graduate, according to her profile on the anti-Israel publication The Electronic Intifada. She beat Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairman Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) with an endorsement from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
CUAD spearheaded protests that led to a violent encampment at the campus in 2024 and a takeover of a Columbia-affiliated Barnard College building in 2025. The organization, which the university does not recognize as a student group, also sparked controversy in February for posting “death to America” in Farsi on X after the United States and Israel began military attacks on Iran, the Columbia Spectator reported.
Months earlier, CUAD called for “the total eradication of Western civilization” in an Instagram post.
CUAD also described Hamas’s October 2023 massacre and hostage-taking operation in Israel as a “crowning achievement” in 2024.
Avila Chevalier’s campaign did not respond to the Washington Examiner‘s request for comment. She previously described encountering a heavy police response while participating in the CUAD-backed Columbia encampment in a 2024 interview with Time magazine. “I felt totally helpless at that point … it was quite horrific,” she told the magazine. “There was nothing calm or organized about the situation.”
The candidate was one of three Mamdani-backed socialists who won Democratic primaries on Tuesday. The victories are accelerating the rise of Mamdani and his left-wing faction’s influence over the Democratic Party.
Avila Chevalier’s past radical statements came under criticism in a Tuesday Spanish-language radio interview, multiple outlets reported. The interviewer pressed her on social media posts, saying she would not post the Dominican flag because nationalism is “violent.” She walked out of the interview after being asked to address the controversy specifically.
Her controversial past rhetoric also included a 2019 post saying she wiped her hand on the American flag instead of a napkin.
MAMDANI-BACKED CANDIDATE REFUSES TO DIRECTLY ANSWER IF MURDERERS SHOULD GO TO JAIL
Additionally, the self-described “prison abolitionist” dodged a question four times in a Thursday interview about whether she believes in locking up convicted murderers.
“The fact that the murder happened is tragic,” she told the New York Editorial Board in one exchange. “The fact that there was a circumstance in which that could even come to pass is tragic, and all of that is a reflection of systems that allowed that circumstance to be possible. And so, you know, I have always focused my attention on how do we create systems where that’s not even a possibility.”