She's Feeding You the Point

Aber Kawas, Hasan Piker, a Linda Sarsour talking point whispered off-camera, and what "A City to Win" actually looked like from inside the room.

The best moment at NYC-DSA's "A City to Win" rally wasn't in the script. Hasan Piker was mid-interview with Aber Kawas, working toward the milestone framing, when a voice came in off-camera. Linda Sarsour, not visible, feeding him the line: Kawas would be the first Palestinian-American woman in the New York State legislature. A ready-made talking point, deployed in real time, from the woman who has been shaping Kawas's politics since the candidate's father was in ICE detention.

Kawas didn't miss a beat. "She's feeding you the point," she said, laughing, nodding in Sarsour's direction. The crowd loved it. The transparency of the operation was, apparently, the bit.

That's the Kawas pitch in one moment. The machinery is visible, the candidate is in on the joke, and none of it is supposed to bother you because she's charming enough to name it first.

"This electoral crap. I don't believe in this." -- Aber Kawas, on her mindset during Bernie 2016, when she was working for Sarsour.

The origin story she gave Piker is worth sitting with. Kawas was a skeptic of electoral politics. Didn't believe in it. The conversion happened through Sarsour, who she describes as a mentor, an "auntie" figure, someone who stepped in when her father was detained and helped her family navigate that. Sarsour pulled her into organizing. By the time the Bernie 2016 campaign was running, Kawas was working for Sarsour and thinking, in her own words, "This electoral crap. I don't believe in this." Now she is running for New York Assembly District 34 on the NYC-DSA slate, describing the movement Sarsour "helped build" as the foundation that made her candidacy possible.

She has not stopped working with Sarsour since.

The rally itself ran two modes. One version of Kawas was at the mic doing the softer side of DSA politics, the community organizer with the warmth and the personal testimony. Another version of Kawas, documented from earlier in the same news cycle, was literally punching the air with what appeared to be a Hamas headband in her hand. Both versions showed up. The campaign appears to be betting that the electorate for AD-34 will choose the warmer reading and not look too hard at the other one.

The Abolish ICE call was a different venue, same week. Kawas came in as the featured speaker for NYC-DSA's mass call and did not disappoint the audience that was there for it. ICE is a "mercenary army." Its origins trace to post-9/11 homeland security policy. The historical throughline runs from slave patrols to Indigenous displacement to modern deportation. Free universal childcare is primarily a support system for families navigating ICE detention and court dates. These are the policy positions. She said them plainly and with evident conviction.

Her personal testimony anchored it. Her father was held in ICE detention for three years before being deported. "I lived that impact when my father was detained by ICE." She argued that experience directly into her policy platform, which is one of the more coherent moves in the speech. The theory is: the same institutions that destroyed her family are destroying other families, and the policy response should be built around that reality.

What she did not address was her mother. Also undocumented. Not detained. The absence is notable. The most likely explanation is prosecutorial discretion, the common practice of deprioritizing enforcement against a parent with U.S.-born children. That would mean the system Kawas describes as a universal terror apparatus was, in her family's case, applying exactly the kind of discretionary judgment that critics of abolition often cite. She did not raise this. The audience did not ask.

"We should be unapologetic in that fight. We are not fringe."

The Liam Conejo Ramos case came up as evidence that ICE uses children as bait to lure parents into detention. That characterization is, to use the polite word, disputed. DHS says the child's father fled and left him behind. Kawas presented the family-advocacy version without the DHS response. When you are building an abolition argument on moral shock, contested facts are a structural problem. The audience on the call was not positioned to push back, and she did not invite pushback.

The closing pitch was clean and direct. Socialism is not fringe. The fight is multigenerational. ICE's damage will compound for decades if the institution survives. She wants supporters taxing the rich, pushing childcare, expanding transit. The agenda hangs together as an agenda, even if the individual planks are doing different amounts of lifting.

The Sarsour lineage runs through all of it, and the campaign is not hiding that. What they are betting is that in AD-34 in 2026, the Sarsour network is a feature, not a vulnerability. Maybe they're right.

Primary night is June 23. The talking point will be ready.