New York’s socialist mayor spent the primary season building himself a farm team.
His candidates won. The radical left cheered. City Hall figured the hard part was over.
One of those handpicked recruits hasn’t even reached Congress yet, and she already has Mamdani’s own staff seeing red.
The Mamdani Recruit Who Picked a Fight With the NYPD
Darializa Avila Chevalier holds the Democrat nomination in New York’s 13th Congressional District, a seat that takes in Harlem, Washington Heights, Inwood, and a chunk of the northwest Bronx.
She grabbed it by toppling five-term Congressman Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) in the June primary, 49.4 percent to 45.9 percent with more than 86 percent of the expected vote in, according to NY1. And she had a powerful wind at her back. Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed her in May, reportedly reneging on an earlier promise to back Espaillat, according to the New York Times, and then rallied right beside her before the votes came in.
Avila Chevalier belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America. And she brought a long social media trail into the race with her. Fox News, citing an earlier report, flagged a 2021 repost in which she called abolishing borders, prisons and police “possible, necessary, and the only moral way forward.” She later echoed posts that said “all deportation is wrong” and “Yes, literally abolish the border.”
Then came the Bronx.
In October, ICE agents shot Oscar Belgal, a 28-year-old illegal alien from the Dominican Republic, during an immigration operation. Protesters gathered near the scene.
NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch briefed the press on the incident and walked through Belgal’s criminal history, the same thing the department does at practically every briefing.
That set off the socialists. The national DSA posted a blunt order on X: “We demand that Mayor Zohran Mamdani fire NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch.” Illapa Sairitupac, another Mamdani-backed DSA member who won a Democrat Assembly primary, posted “fire Tisch,” according to Jewish Insider.
And Avila Chevalier piled right on.
She took her complaint to the show of Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and went after Tisch for bringing up Belgal’s record at all.
“You know, I was just so angry as I was listening to it,” Avila Chevalier said. “I have gone back to her remarks to make sure that I was correct in our statement about it. But, to me, it doesn’t even matter, right? It doesn’t even matter.”
Read that one more time. A woman asking for a seat in Congress went back over the commissioner’s words, made sure she had the facts straight, and then shrugged that the facts didn’t matter.
But maybe the venue tells the story better than the words do. Fox News separately reported that Piker admitted to being a “champagne socialist” while talking about his $2.7 million house. Nothing screams solidarity with the working stiff quite like a seven-figure home and a webcam.
Mamdani’s Own People Want Her Muzzled
Mamdani didn’t bite. “Jessica Tisch is the police commissioner. I have no plans to change that,” the mayor told reporters.
He went a step further, too. Jewish Insider reported that Mamdani showed up with Tisch at an event honoring fallen officers and called it “a privilege” to appear alongside her.
But behind the doors at City Hall, the temperature ran a whole lot hotter. Mamdani’s staff reportedly considered Avila Chevalier’s attacks a “direct undermining” of the mayor, according to the New York Post.
“They were ****** about what she did on social media and her public rhetoric on NYPD,” one source told the Post. “City Hall was like, ‘What the **** are you doing!’”
Another source didn’t hold back either. “She is throwing her own fireball rhetoric to rally the folks,” the source said. “But instigating doesn’t help.”
The Post’s sources said Mamdani’s team had pegged her as a “potential liability” for a while. What caught them off guard was how fast the trouble showed up.
“She’s a loose cannon,” a source said. “They are sick of her, and she’s not even started in Congress.”
The NYPD stood behind its commissioner in a statement to Fox News Digital. “The Police Commissioner was giving a factual update on the incident, and we always provide criminal history in incident updates, if we have it. It’s also one of the first questions that every media outlet asks the NYPD,” the department said.
So the department reads out records at briefings. Reporters ask for them first thing. The only thing new this time around was a federal immigration agent on the other end of the story, and suddenly the socialists decided a suspect’s past belonged off the table.
Robespierre Would Know Exactly How This Ends
David Laska, communications director for the New York State Republican Party, put it about as sharply as anyone could.
“Zohran Mamdani helped create this monster with years of anti-American, antisemitic rhetoric, and now it’s eating him alive. History reminds us that even Robespierre was guillotined in the end,” Laska told Fox News Digital.
Mamdani can’t wriggle out from under that one. Fox News reported that the mayor himself branded ICE a “rogue” agency after the shooting and demanded that President Trump release the illegal alien. Now he wants credit as the steady hand for keeping Tisch. But he poured the gasoline long before Avila Chevalier ever struck the match.
And the DSA doesn’t hide what it wants. Its 2026 national platform, as quoted by the Washington Examiner, calls to “demilitarize police departments, disempower police unions, and redirect funding to public services as steps toward fully abolishing the police and prison system which protects the rich and jails the poor.” The same document would “grant amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status” and “establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries.”
It doesn’t stop at the economy, either. The platform would “abolish the Senate” and, according to City Journal’s reporting on the document, replace the presidency and the Supreme Court with “an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.”
That’s the old Marxist playbook in plain English. Seize the big companies, knock down the constitutional guardrails, and hand every lever of power to one body. Every country that tried some version of it, from the Soviet Union to Venezuela, wound up with empty shelves, a crushed middle class, and a ruling clique that never missed a meal.
The DSA has reportedly tied its endorsements to support for that platform, according to the International Business Times.
So Avila Chevalier isn’t freelancing here. Her campaign listed abolishing ICE among its priorities from the start, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Going after a police commissioner for doing her job is simply the platform clocking in for its shift.
President Trump won the 2024 election on a promise to secure the border and remove illegal aliens. ICE agents carry out that mandate in some of the most hostile cities in the country. The people who want those agents gone have made no secret that the cops who stand behind them come next.
Maybe that gets a little ahead of the evidence. Mamdani kept his commissioner, and he deserves a sliver of credit for that much.
But a sliver is all it is. The socialists who carried Mamdani into Gracie Mansion just showed they’ll turn on him the first time he refuses an order. And Avila Chevalier hasn’t cast a single vote yet.
New York’s socialists built themselves a revolution. Mamdani gets to find out who it eats next.
Sources: Fox News, “Mamdani’s team reportedly clashing with socialist candidate he endorsed over ICE shooting”; New York Post; Jewish Insider, “Mamdani stands by NYPD’s Tisch as allies demand her removal”; NY1, NY-13 Democratic primary results; Fox News, “Mamdani-backed socialist with history of anti-American rhetoric wins vicious Dem primary race”; Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Mamdani endorses former Columbia encampment organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier”; Washington Examiner, “What DSA wants”; International Business Times, “DSA Makes It Official: Endorsed Candidates Must Back Abolishing the Senate, Presidency and Supreme Court”; City Journal reporting on the DSA platform, via Justice Moms Substack.
