A New York congressional candidate says a police officer threw her to the ground while she tried to calm a crowd, but video shows protesters ramming barricades into officers moments earlier.
Quick Take
- Darializa Avila Chevalier, a Democratic Socialists of America-backed congressional candidate, was shoved to the ground by an NYPD officer during an anti-ICE protest in the Bronx.
- The protest erupted after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents shot a man suspected of being in the country illegally.
- Video shows protesters pushing metal barricades into police lines before the shove occurred.
- Chevalier says she was trying to de-escalate and is now calling for NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch to resign.
A Protest Turns Physical Outside a Bronx Hospital
Hundreds of protesters gathered outside NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital Thursday night after ICE agents shot a man suspected of being an undocumented immigrant. The crowd grew angry fast. Video from the scene shows demonstrators grabbing metal barricades and ramming them toward NYPD officers as the standoff escalated. Officers pushed back to hold their line, and the shoving match spread through the crowd within minutes.
Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Democratic socialist who already knocked off a four-term incumbent to win her party’s nomination in New York’s 13th congressional district, was in the middle of it. Reporting from the New York Post says she tried telling fellow protesters to step back before turning on a supervising officer, shouting that police were the ones “escalating” the situation. Moments later, she ended up on the pavement.
Chevalier Says She Was the Peacemaker, Not the Aggressor
Chevalier tells a different story. She says she was working to calm things down when an officer pushed her to the ground, not sparking trouble herself. “When I was in Marble Hill last night I saw NYPD officers rapidly escalating violence. As I was trying to de-escalate, I was shoved to the ground by an officer,” she said in a statement circulated after the protest.
She went further on CNN, telling the network she has been arrested three times at protests before but never thrown to the ground by an officer until Thursday night. She also claimed unmarked law enforcement vehicles struck protesters while officers cleared people out of the way, and that NYPD actions pushed “myself and others” down during the chaos.
Video Shows Barricades Flying Before the Shove
Here is the problem with the victim narrative: the video everyone can watch does not start with a calm crowd and a rogue cop. It starts with protesters using steel barricades as battering rams against officers trying to hold a line outside a hospital. A supervising officer being shouted at mid-confrontation is not the same as an officer randomly targeting a bystander.
None of that erases the fact that Chevalier ended up on the ground, and that footage appears to show an officer making contact with her during the scrum. Whether that single shove was a proportionate response to a surging, barricade-throwing crowd, or an overreaction aimed at a political figure, is exactly the kind of judgment call that body-camera reviews and internal affairs exist to sort out. It is not a settled fact either way.
Why This Fight Matters Beyond One Shove
New York City has been here before. The NYPD settled a federal lawsuit in 2023 over its handling of the 2020 protests, agreeing to overhaul crowd-control tactics after accusations of excessive force and false arrests during demonstrations. That history means every shove at a protest now gets measured against a court-ordered standard, not just public opinion.
Chevalier is using the moment to call for Commissioner Tisch’s ouster, framing the NYPD as protecting federal immigration agents rather than city residents. That is a political argument dressed up as a safety complaint. A candidate who confronts a supervising officer during a barricade-throwing melee, then gets pushed, does not automatically become the victim of police brutality just because the cameras caught the fall and not the shove’s full context.
🇺🇸 Tacoma, Washington
Anti-ICE demonstrators gathered during federal immigration-enforcement activity in the Tacoma area, with footage appearing to show protesters confronting and surrounding ICE vehicles.
The confrontation highlights the growing tensions surrounding federal… pic.twitter.com/TUDfstxgxq
— EuroPost Agency (@EuroPostAgency) October 5, 2026
The shooting that sparked the protest remains under scrutiny, and that investigation deserves to run its course before anyone declares a verdict. But conflating a chaotic, barricade-slinging street confrontation with a simple story of an innocent peacemaker thrown down by police asks readers to ignore the first half of the video to believe the second half.
Sources:
thegatewaypundit.com, cnn.com, transcripts.cnn.com, tandfonline.com
© restoreamericanglory.com 2026. All rights reserved.
