Darializa Avila-Chevalier wrote an academic paper concluding US border enforcement is rooted in “anti-Blackness and Islamophobia,” The Post can reveal.
The Mayor Zohran Mamdani-backed Congressional candidate — a member of the Democratic Socialists of America running for New York’s 13th District — uses a single case study to advance sweeping conclusions the entire US counterterrorism system is structurally racist and designed to surveil perceived political foes.
Chevalier — who deleted old tweets saying she wanted to abolish police, prisons and borders according to CNN — wrote the 2023 paper on the case of Abdikadir Mohamed, a Somali man with US permanent residency who was detained upon arrival at JFK Airport in 2017.
She focuses on Mohamed’s questioning by CBP’s Tactical Terrorism Response Team at the airport, claiming: “The TTRT’s practices and targeting of Mohamed was a form of border violence constitutive of a praxis of anti-Blackness and Islamophobia, ideologies central to the logic of American counterterrorism policy.”
A key detail her paper fails to mention is the closeness of Mohamed’s name to that of Abdikadir Mohamed Abdukadir, a wanted Somali terrorist from the radical jihadist organization Al-Shabaab, a likely explanation for his questioning. She also fails to offer any alternative measures for determining security threats in the 25-page paper, written while she studied at City University of New York.
Throughout Chevalier’s paper, she argues TTRT and Customs and Border Protection counterterrorism policies operate within what she describes as a “permanent state of exception” driven by “anti-Blackness and Islamophobia,” yet never consides that many members of CBP are themselves black or follow Islam.
She also contends that counterterrorism measures at the US border are used not only to police migration but also to surveil “and control social movements” of people once they’re inside the country.
Chevalier’s paper, titled “The securitisation of immigration through the Tactical Terrorism Response Team,” describes US border enforcement as an extension of racialized state violence and frames counterterrorism as a mechanism for controlling Black Muslim refugees, rather than protecting national security.
She goes on to accuse ” TTRT [of engaging] in a process I call social homicide, which subjects travelers to a condition of bare life,” a political theory describing people’s lives which are so restricted they are allowed to do little more than survive.
Chevalier claims the principal evidence for detaining Mohamed appears to have been a press release from Ogaden National Liberation Front found stored on his phone. However, in accordance with US counterterrorism laws, CBP has never publicly explained it reasons for detaining Mohamed.
Mohamed was transferred to ICE custody, where he spent 17 months and contracted Tuberculosis before being released. He was never charged, and the handling of his case has been widely criticized.
Chevalier and CBP did not respond to The Post’s request for comment. The government agency also fought in court to keep the methods used by TTRT secret.
Mohamed submitted a statement to congress in 2019, where he accused ICE and others of not following proper protocol and making his condition worse before his release.
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 in the Democratic primary for the 13th District.
As previously revealed by The Post, she formerly held a leadership role in Columbia University’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter, which demanded the “total eradication of Western civilization”, was part of the 2024 campus takeover, and celebrated the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre as a “moral, military and political victory”.
Chevalier, a 32-year-old doctoral student, thanks several academics in the paper’s acknowledgements, including CUNY law professor Ramzi Kassem, whom it was revealed last week she is dating.
Kassem founded and co-directs CLEAR, a legal clinic that has represented clients challenging post-9/11 surveillance programs, terrorism watchlists, immigration enforcement and other national security policies.
Chevalier’s skepticism toward Israel also stretches back more than a decade.
In a lengthy 2014 letter to the Columbia Spectator while a Columbia undergraduate, Chevalier accused unnamed Israelis of subjecting her and others to “a great deal of violence — sexual and otherwise” during a visit to Jerusalem.
“The harassment I experienced from Israelis was almost definitely a result of my Afro-Latina identity,” she wrote.
Chevalier argued that criticism of Students for Justice in Palestine amounted to silencing “survivors of color” and defended the group’s decision to invoke convicted Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh during a campus rally about sexual assault.
“When SJP spoke of Rasmea Odeh’s rape, it was doing so in line with the notions of intersectionality that I spoke about at the rally,” she wrote, arguing that Odeh’s experiences were dismissed because of what she described as a “colonialist power structure.”
She also expressed her public support for Odeh on social media.As previously reported by the Washington Free Beacon, Chevalier posted a Facebook message in December 2014 urging supporters to donate to Odeh’s legal defense during her immigration fraud proceedings in Detroit.
“Help Rasmea come home!” Chevalier wrote alongside a link raising money for Odeh’s bail.
Odeh was convicted by an Israeli military court for her role in a pair of 1969 bombings in the country which killed two Hebrew University students and injured several others.
The heinous crimes were carried out under the flag of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a US-designated terror group.
She was sentenced to life in prison before being released in a prisoner exchange and eventually immigrated to the US. She was later convicted of immigration fraud for failing to disclose her terrorism conviction on citizenship paperwork.
She was then stripped of her citizenship, barred from the country for life and deported to Jordan.
