Darializa Avila Chevalier, a socialist candidate backed by DSA and the apparent victor in New York’s 13th Congressional District primary, has ties to a radical anti-Israel group and participated in the 2024 campus takeover at Columbia University. Chevalier, 32, co-founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), an organization focused on pressuring the university to sever financial ties with Israel.
CUAD was a prominent group involved in the tent encampment protests that occupied Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus for weeks in the spring of 2024. Chevalier, a Columbia alumna, expressed her support for the student organizers during the demonstrations, telling reporters she was happy to assist the alumni network in supporting the students when needed. She described the encampment, which ended after police intervention and led to numerous student suspensions and expulsions, as a "beautiful thing to see."
Chevalier suggested that Columbia University President Minouche Shafik could resolve the protest by meeting the students' demands, noting the university had previously divested from interests such as private prisons and South African apartheid. She stated that divestment was a matter of "when, not if."
CUAD's past online statements, since deleted, indicated a more radical stance. In one post, the group declared, "We are Westerners fighting for the total eradication of Western civilization. We stand in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South. Our Intifada is an internationalist one — we are fighting for nothing less than the liberation of all people." The post also stated, "We reject every genocidal, eugenicist regime that seeks to undermine the personhood of the colonized" and sought "community and instruction from militants in the Global South, who have been on the frontlines in the fight against tyranny and domination which undergird the imperialist world order."
Another former member of CUAD, Mahmoud Khalil, was arrested by immigration agents in March 2025 and is appealing a decision to avoid deportation. The protests at Columbia resulted in injuries, property damage, and a climate described as fearful by some Jewish students and faculty. Following the encampment, more than 70 students faced lengthy suspensions, and several were expelled.