Mamdani backed DSA candidate Darializa Chevalier blasted border patrol as steeped in anti-Blackness and Islamophobia

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...