The past six months in the United States have seen a historic uptick in class struggle over immigration. Since October 2025, the Trump Administration’s ICE offensive has terrorized immigrants across the nation, including Chicago, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis.
The anti-ICE organizing seen in cities most affected by far-right immigration crackdowns has marked a new chapter in struggle and in the consciousness of the masses, particularly amid growing discontent with capitalism. It’s no surprise, therefore, that candidates supporting immigrant rights, like Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York City, have won electoral victories shaped by this upsurge in struggle.
Historic Wins for Democratic Socialists
During the recent primary elections, candidates endorsed by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) won big, primarily in major cities like New York and Washington, D.C., as well as in Pennsylvania and Colorado. This advance for DSA-endorsed figures is a result of many young people looking for alternatives to endless capitalist crises, and finding hope in these candidates’ platforms, including pro-immigrants rights.
Chevalier, a DSA member, lead organizer on the Zohran for Mayor campaign, and a PhD student at the City University of New York, defeated Democratic incumbent Adriano Espaillat in the primary race for New York’s 13th Congressional District. Her platform includes things like ending the U.S. government’s support of the genocide in Palestine, taxing the rich and fighting corporate greed, expanding housing and medicare access, and, notably:
- Abolishing ICE and the deportation machine
- Expanding pathways to citizenship, including for DREAMers and undocumented immigrants
- Mandating free legal representation for immigrants’ interactions with DHS, and to support them through the immigration process
- Funding programs to ensure immigrants get free, quality immigration support
- Enshrine in law protections for pre-schools, places of worship, and other sensitive sites
Chevalier has even stated in interviews that all deportations must end, even when a person has committed a crime. She also correctly identifies that ICE “exists to control our communities, not to keep us safe.”
No doubt, her platform signals an enormously progressive shift among large sectors of people in the United States, and demonstrates of how deeply unpopular the recent far-right attacks on immigration have been.
So, how do we engage with this new political moment to win rights for all immigrants?
Working Within the Democratic Party Won’t Win Full Immigrant Rights
DSA’s strategy is to run candidates on the Democratic Party ballot line. If we just elect enough democratic socialists like Chevalier, the reasoning goes, we’ll be able to enact progressive policies — like immigrant rights and abolishing ICE — from within the state. But as we’ve argued repeatedly, this strategy diverts the energy off the streets and into the capitalist halls of Congress, where struggle is suffocated.
Working within the Democratic Party squashes and demobilizes social movements. After all, the Democrats have repeatedly betrayed the immigrant rights movement after channeling it into the ballot box. Throughout his presidency, Joe Biden enacted anti-immigrant measures, some of which were even stricter than those imposed during Trump’s first term. Democrats and Republicans alike have advocated for stricter border policies, more draconian immigration laws, and helped ICE’s budget balloon. For his part, Barack Obama was the “deporter in chief.”
This is no coincidence: Capitalism relies on exploiting undocumented immigrants for cheap labor. And by scapegoating migrants, bourgeois politicians divide workers and prevent us from showing solidarity with our class siblings — solidarity which would be powerful enough to topple the whole system. This is why working within a capitalist party, as Chevalier, Lander, and Valdez will do, is fundamentally incompatible with true liberation for immigrants, let alone for all exploited and oppressed people.
Full Rights for All Immigrants
When asked what her approach would be to serving in Congress, Chevalier replied,
I’m an organizer, and that’s really all I want to be. I want to do that in the House because I think that for us to actually deliver for our community, we have to be willing to organize together….As an organizer, I always tell people, ‘Organize me into something bigger,’ because we need to be able to build something much bigger than any one representative in Congress and much bigger than any seat.
In some ways, Chevalier is right: We must build something much bigger than any Congressional seat. But rather than throwing our energy behind candidates running within the Democratic Party with progressive immigration platforms, we should use the energy of the struggle for immigrants rights to organize for full rights for all immigrants — in our workplaces, in our schools, and in the streets.
Chevalier should use her seat to demand full rights for immigrants, advocate for unions to demand the same, and call on DSA to mobilize their membership for immigrants’ rights. Yet, DSA’s strategy of working within the Democratic Party has serious limits: if Chevalier wins a seat in Congress, that position will be sharply limited unless there is independent organization from below forcing a break with the party’s pro‑deportation logic.
This year, the Trump administration to experience important defeats as a direct result of class struggle, not as a result of the actions of the Democrats. The potential to win real gains is not far-fetched, it is a material reality. We must demand more for immigrants, using the class struggle that defeated Operation Metro Surge to secure our demands.
Immigrants in the United States currently do not have the right to organize freely: their freedom of protest and freedom of speech is limited by the constant threat of deportation, as was shown clearly in cases like the detention of Mahmoud Khalil or of Leqaa Kordia, to name just a few. Immigrants to do not have access to the same social services that citizens do, they cannot access higher education programs like FAFSA, they cannot freely access jobs like citizens can, and their quality of life is constantly hanging in the balance due to their intense precariousness.
Pitting immigrant against citizens effectively splits the U.S. working class into two layers, wherein the citizen layer has a whole host of democratic and legal rights available to them that are not granted to immigrants. This unjust, but reversible. We can fight for full rights for all immigrants, and the recent wave of class struggle to defend immigrants’ rights shows us that the potential to fight and to win is there — if we organize form below.
The post Chevalier’s Win Reflects Growing Support for Immigrants, but Full Rights Will Be Won from Below appeared first on Left Voice.
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