Adriano Espaillat

Democratic Socialist and community organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier could soon become one of Congress’s youngest members as she challenges long-standing representative Adriano Espaillat, who is seeking a sixth term in office. But the 32-year-old will head into Tuesday’s primary in New York’s 13th Congressional District with increasing scrutiny on a series of old social-media posts that are prompting controversy in the waning days of the race.

In May, Politico unearthed a series of posts from Avila Chevalier’s deleted X account that were critical of a number of Democratic political officials including Vice-President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden. In one tweet from June 2021, Avila Chevalier wrote, “I have no nuance to add. Fuck Kamala Harris,” in response to a clip of remarks in which Harris advises migrants from Guatemala to not come to the United States. In 2020, Avila Chevalier voiced criticism of Biden and indicated that she didn’t intend to vote for him for president, calling him a “war criminal” and a “rapist” in separate posts.

A CNN report published earlier this month examined hundreds of posts Chevalier made in her 20s that included calls to defund the police and reposts of messages in favor of abolishing the nation’s borders and opposing all forms of deportation. The Espaillat campaign recently released a 30-second spot, reported on by the New York Post, that sought to highlight Avila Chevalier’s social-media posts, the ad opening with a voice-over: “Let’s meet Darializa in her own words.”

During a WNYC debate earlier this month, Avila Chevalier said that she has grown since the posts were written and suggested that the focus on her past online activity was a distraction from the real issues of the race. “I’m not interested in relitigating the politics of my tweets, which are politics of the past,” she said.

In recent days, Avila Chevalier has apologized more directly for some of her past inflammatory rhetoric. “I deeply regret those tweets, and the values that I hold are the values of justice, of human dignity, of accountability. And so this is me taking accountability, and I’m happy to model accountability,” she said during an NY1 debate Tuesday.

During that same debate, Espaillat asked Avila Chevalier directly if she would publicly apologize to Harris for her comment. She said she would. “To Vice-President Kamala Harris, I sincerely apologize because you did not deserve that language from me, and I would have loved to see a Black woman president. As a Black woman, I know how much that would’ve meant to so many, including myself,” she said.

But Avila Chevalier was clear on which words she did stand by. During a sit-down with Vox’s Astead Herndon, she was asked about her past tweets in which she said all forms of deportation were wrong. “I still believe all deportations are wrong,” she said.

Avila Chevalier continued, “The reason I say that is because we have a criminal system. It is imperfect, but it exists. And it is one that if we accept as the process by which that we want to engage with these issues — the issues of harm, issues of criminality, what have you — then we need to make sure that it is one that isn’t also discriminatory on the basis of where people were born.”

Last month, Mayor Zohran Mamdani officially backed Avila Chevalier in the race as part of his slate of congressional endorsements this election cycle. In addition to her, he has also endorsed former comptroller Brad Lander, who is challenging Representative Dan Goldman in the Tenth Congressional District spanning lower Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn, and Assemblymember Claire Valdez, who is running for retiring Representative Nydia Velázquez’s open seat in the Seventh Congressional District in Brooklyn and Queens.