Daria Liza Avila Chevalier

I'm Maria Lisa Avila Chevalier, and I'll defend New York by abolishing ICE.

I'm Claire Valdez, and I'll stand up against bad landlords and greedy corporations.

I came to my politics of socialism, democratic socialism through a race system.

lens, right?

I was doing a lot of reading of the Black radical tradition.

I was doing a lot of organizing around ending mass incarceration, around immigration justice.

I was part of BYP100, Black Youth Project 100, Families for Freedom doing immigration justice organizing, and a number of other organizations around racial justice and economic justice.

And even my research, my doctoral research is around a lot of these issues.

And

For me, racial justice and economic justice have always been inextricable.

And that is how I came to a politics of socialism, right?

That phrase, yes.

I still believe that all deportations are wrong.

So when we're talking about things like illegal entry, we're actually talking about administrative laws, right?

We're not talking about criminal law.

And we we really need to make a have an understanding of what it is that we are doing when we say that people who are noncitizens who have a different status based on where they were born, why they should endure an additional form of punishment when they have already gone through the criminal system.

I saw so many connections between what was happening to Palestinians there in Palestine and what was happening to so many communities across the US, particularly black and Latino communities who have been priced out and pushed out of our homes.

When we talk about displacement in the West Bank or in Gaza, it is a very similar, visually similar situation where people who have been in a place for generations are being displaced because of corporate interests, because of folks who are coming in, claiming the land,

and buying it up and kicking the people who live there out.

And I've seen a lot of similarities, not just in the way things are done, but also in the very institutions that are enacting that violence.