Chuck Park, the former U.S. diplomat who ran an anti-ICE campaign to unseat Rep. Grace Meng in Queens, once recounted hoping that a deported 13-year-old he had personally denied a visa would find “the best smuggler they could afford” to get back into the United States.
The comments, made at a 2020 Columbia University seminar series, were first reported by the New York Post on June 8, during Park’s primary challenge against Meng in New York’s 6th Congressional District. Park, who worked as a diplomat before resigning to become an immigration activist, was asked at the seminar about his time on the job.
He described a teenager he said he interviewed early in his first posting. “In June 2012, about a little over a year into my first tour, I interviewed one aspiring immigrant. His name was Brayan Rio. He was 13 years old, and he was a dreamer. He was born in Mexico,” Park said, per the Post. He said Rio had first lied about his immigration status at age 5.
“I closed the gates of America to him,” Park said, in what the Post described as a reference to his role in a government where such lying is illegal. “I don’t know if he made it back to California, but I really hope he did,” he added, before saying he hoped Rio and his family found “the best smuggler they could afford” to bring the boy back into the country.
Park did not back away from the story when the Post asked about it. “I tell Brayan’s story because that moment never left me,” he said in a statement to the paper. “It still angers me that our incoherent immigration laws could deny a child legal status in the only home he ever knew. Experiences like this are exactly why I resigned” the diplomatic post. “In Congress, I’ll fight for a pathway for citizenship for dreamers like Brian and every other immigrant in this country.”
The remarks squared with the platform Park built his campaign on. He ran to Meng’s left on immigration, and was arrested this spring for blocking a building entrance at a pro-worker May Day protest on Wall Street, according to the Post. He had no machine behind him. There was little public polling on the race. Park counted more than 72,000 social-media followers to Meng’s roughly 5,000, but Meng, a seven-term incumbent, had lined up union backing, including the District Council of Carpenters and Unite Here Local 100, which represents about 17,000 hotel workers across the city.
That backing held. Meng went on to win the primary by nearly 14 points, with Orthodox precincts in Kew Gardens Hills breaking 92 percent in her favor.
