A Democratic primary challenger in New York wants to abolish ICE and opposes deporting illegal immigrants convicted of violent crimes, including murder, child sexual abuse, and kidnapping, calling such enforcement "discriminatory" and a form of unconstitutional "double punishment."
Darializa Avila Chevalier, who is running against Rep. Adriano Espaillat in a New York Democratic primary, made the remarks during a podcast interview with Vox Media's Astead Herndon. When pressed on whether her blanket opposition to deportation extends to people convicted of serious crimes under U.S. law, she did not flinch.
She doubled down. And New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has her back.
Herndon's question was direct. As Breitbart News reported, the interviewer laid the logical implications of Chevalier's position right at her feet:
"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. Is the deportation of those people wrong?"
Chevalier confirmed it was. She told Herndon:
"That phrase, yes, I still believe that all deportations are wrong."
She then offered her reasoning, a legal theory that would strike most Americans as a radical rewriting of how sovereignty and criminal justice work. Chevalier argued that deporting an illegal immigrant after that person has served a criminal sentence amounts to punishing someone twice for the same offense. She framed it as a constitutional violation akin to double jeopardy:
"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. If we truly believe that double jeopardy is something that is unconstitutional, something that is unethical, something that is against the principles of equality in this country, we cannot subject people to that on the basis of where they were born."
In other words, a foreign national who entered the country illegally, committed murder or raped a child, and served a prison sentence should, in Chevalier's view, simply be released back into American communities. Sending that person home would be discriminatory, because an American citizen convicted of the same crime would not face deportation.
That comparison collapses the distinction between citizens and non-citizens entirely. It treats the enforcement of immigration law itself as an injustice.
Chevalier's podcast remarks are not an isolated sound bite. Her campaign website includes an explicit vow to help abolish ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency within the Department of Homeland Security responsible for enforcing federal immigration law across the country.
Her campaign's own language describes ICE in terms usually reserved for authoritarian regimes, not federal law enforcement. The website states:
"This agency exists to control our communities, not to keep us safe. It was created in 2002: we can return to a world where it does not exist."
The framing is deliberate. ICE does not protect communities, in this telling, it oppresses them. And because it was established only in 2002, the argument goes, its existence is somehow optional. The fact that ICE was created in the wake of the September 11 attacks as part of a sweeping reorganization of homeland security apparently does not factor into the analysis.
Mayor Mamdani, whose tenure in City Hall has generated no shortage of controversy, has endorsed Chevalier and appeared alongside her in a campaign ad. In that ad, he praised her as a defender of illegal immigrants and highlighted her work reuniting families separated by ICE enforcement actions.
The mayor's backing is not incidental. Mamdani has built a political brand around opposition to immigration enforcement and confrontation with federal authorities. His endorsement of a candidate who openly opposes deporting convicted violent criminals tells voters exactly where the ideological center of gravity sits in his wing of the Democratic Party.
This is the same mayor who has faced repeated public scrutiny over credibility questions and whose relationship with the NYPD has been marked by friction. His policing decisions have drawn criticism not just from conservatives but from members of his own political coalition.
Now he is lending his name and his political operation to a congressional candidate whose stated platform would strip the federal government of its ability to remove foreign nationals convicted of the most serious crimes on the books.
Chevalier's double-jeopardy argument deserves scrutiny because it sounds superficially legalistic, and because it is wrong on the law. The double jeopardy clause of the Fifth Amendment prohibits the government from prosecuting a person twice for the same criminal offense. Deportation is not a criminal prosecution. It is a civil immigration proceeding. Federal courts have held this distinction for generations.
Chevalier herself acknowledged the criminal justice system is "imperfect, but it exists." She then argued that if Americans accept that system as the mechanism for addressing harm and criminality, it must not be "discriminatory on the basis of where people were born."
But immigration law, by definition, distinguishes between citizens and non-citizens. That is not a bug. It is the entire premise of national sovereignty. Every country on earth reserves the right to remove non-citizens who violate its laws. Calling that principle discriminatory does not make it unconstitutional, it makes the argument incoherent.
Chevalier's position also ignores the victims. A child who was sexually abused by an illegal immigrant, or a family whose loved one was murdered, would learn under this framework that the perpetrator, after serving a sentence, gets to remain in the same country, the same community, perhaps the same neighborhood. The candidate's concern runs entirely in one direction: toward the offender's ties and attachments. The people harmed do not appear in her calculus.
Chevalier is challenging Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the incumbent Democrat. Espaillat has not, based on available reporting, publicly responded to Chevalier's position on deportations. The primary will test whether voters in this New York district, a heavily immigrant community, share their challenger's view that convicted violent criminals should remain in the United States after serving their sentences.
It is worth noting that Mamdani's own record of polarizing public decisions has not stopped him from campaigning aggressively for allies who share his ideological commitments. His endorsement of Chevalier is a bet that the Democratic electorate in this district has moved far enough left to embrace a candidate who opposes all deportations without exception.
That bet may or may not pay off at the ballot box. But it reveals something important about the direction a faction of the Democratic Party wants to take the country. When a candidate says out loud that deporting a convicted child rapist is wrong, and a sitting mayor endorses her, the position is no longer fringe. It is a platform.
Several questions remain unanswered. Has Espaillat taken a position on Chevalier's deportation stance? Will national Democratic leaders distance themselves from a candidate who opposes removing convicted violent criminals? And will Mamdani be asked whether he personally agrees that murderers and child sex offenders who are in the country illegally should remain after serving their sentences?
These are not trick questions. They are the natural, obvious follow-ups to a position Chevalier stated clearly and voluntarily. She was not ambushed. She was not misquoted. She was asked a straightforward question and gave a straightforward answer.
When a candidate for Congress tells the country that deporting a convicted murderer is unconstitutional and a sitting big-city mayor stands behind her, the rest of us are entitled to take them at their word, and to vote accordingly.
