Darializa Avila-Chevalier wrote an educational paper concluding US border enforcement is rooted in “anti-Blackness and Islamophobia,” The Put up can reveal.
The Mayor Zohran Mamdani-backed Congressional candidate — a member of the Democratic Socialists of America operating for New York’s thirteenth District — makes use of a single case research to advance sweeping conclusions the whole US counterterrorism system is structurally racist and designed to surveil perceived political foes.
Chevalier — who deleted outdated tweets saying she needed to abolish police, prisons and borders in accordance with CNN — wrote the 2023 paper on the case of Abdikadir Mohamed, a Somali man with US everlasting residency who was detained upon arrival at JFK Airport in 2017.
She focuses on Mohamed’s questioning by CBP’s Tactical Terrorism Response Staff on the airport, claiming: “The TTRT’s practices and concentrating on of Mohamed was a type of border violence constitutive of a praxis of anti-Blackness and Islamophobia, ideologies central to the logic of American counterterrorism coverage.”
A key element her paper fails to say is the closeness of Mohamed’s identify to that of Abdikadir Mohamed Abdukadir, a needed Somali terrorist from the novel jihadist group Al-Shabaab, a possible clarification for his questioning. She additionally fails to supply any different measures for figuring out safety threats within the 25-page paper, written whereas she studied at Metropolis College of New York.
All through Chevalier’s paper, she argues TTRT and Customs and Border Safety counterterrorism insurance policies function inside what she describes as a “everlasting state of exception” pushed by “anti-Blackness and Islamophobia,” but by no means consides that many members of CBP are themselves black or observe Islam.
She additionally contends that counterterrorism measures on the US border are used not solely to police migration but additionally to surveil “and management social actions” of individuals as soon as they’re contained in the nation.
Chevalier’s paper, titled “The securitisation of immigration by the Tactical Terrorism Response Staff,” describes US border enforcement as an extension of racialized state violence and frames counterterrorism as a mechanism for controlling Black Muslim refugees, somewhat than defending nationwide safety.
She goes on to accuse ” TTRT [of engaging] in a course of I name social murder, which topics vacationers to a situation of naked life,” a political principle describing individuals’s lives that are so restricted they’re allowed to do little greater than survive.
Chevalier claims the principal proof for detaining Mohamed seems to have been a press launch from Ogaden Nationwide Liberation Entrance discovered saved on his cellphone. Nonetheless, in accordance with US counterterrorism legal guidelines, CBP has by no means publicly defined it causes for detaining Mohamed.
Mohamed was transferred to ICE custody, the place he spent 17 months and contracted Tuberculosis earlier than being launched. He was by no means charged, and the dealing with of his case has been broadly criticized.
Chevalier and CBP didn’t reply to The Put up’s request for remark. The federal government company additionally fought in courtroom to maintain the strategies utilized by TTRT secret.
Mohamed submitted a press release to congress in 2019, the place he accused ICE and others of not following correct protocol and making his situation worse earlier than his launch.
The resurfaced radical writings of Chevalier — now a sociology PhD candidate at CUNY — add to mounting scrutiny of her intentions as a candidate, after she pulled off a shock victory within the Democratic major for the thirteenth District.
As beforehand revealed by The Put up, she previously held a management position in Columbia College’s College students for Justice in Palestine chapter, which demanded the “whole eradication of Western civilization”, was a part of the 2024 campus takeover, and celebrated the Oct. 7 Hamas bloodbath as a “ethical, army and political victory”.
Chevalier, a 32-year-old doctoral scholar, thanks a number of teachers within the paper’s acknowledgements, together with CUNY legislation professor Ramzi Kassem, whom it was revealed final week she is courting.
Kassem based and co-directs CLEAR, a authorized clinic that has represented shoppers difficult post-9/11 surveillance packages, terrorism watchlists, immigration enforcement and different nationwide safety insurance policies.
Chevalier’s skepticism towards Israel additionally stretches again greater than a decade.
In a prolonged 2014 letter to the Columbia Spectator whereas a Columbia undergraduate, Chevalier accused unnamed Israelis of subjecting her and others to “quite a lot of violence — sexual and in any other case” throughout a go to to Jerusalem.
“The harassment I skilled from Israelis was nearly undoubtedly a results of my Afro-Latina identification,” she wrote.
Chevalier argued that criticism of College students for Justice in Palestine amounted to silencing “survivors of shade” and defended the group’s resolution to invoke convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh throughout a campus rally about sexual assault.
“When SJP spoke of Rasmea Odeh’s rape, it was doing so in step with the notions of intersectionality that I spoke about on the rally,” she wrote, arguing that Odeh’s experiences had been dismissed due to what she described as a “colonialist energy construction.”
She additionally expressed her public help for Odeh on social media.As beforehand reported by the Washington Free Beacon, Chevalier posted a Fb message in December 2014 urging supporters to donate to Odeh’s authorized protection throughout her immigration fraud proceedings in Detroit.
“Assist Rasmea come dwelling!” Chevalier wrote alongside a hyperlink elevating cash for Odeh’s bail.
Odeh was convicted by an Israeli army courtroom for her position in a pair of 1969 bombings within the nation which killed two Hebrew College college students and injured a number of others.
The heinous crimes had been carried out beneath the flag of the Standard Entrance for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a US-designated terror group.
She was sentenced to life in jail earlier than being launched in a prisoner alternate and finally immigrated to the US. She was later convicted of immigration fraud for failing to reveal her terrorism conviction on citizenship paperwork.
She was then stripped of her citizenship, barred from the nation for all times and deported to Jordan.
