If you live in Greenpoint, Williamsburg or anywhere along the western Queens and north Brooklyn stretch that Nydia Velázquez has represented for more than three decades, the people fighting to replace her just had their first real on-camera scrap, and it was not about rent or the subway. It was about whether the mayor you almost certainly voted for should ever be in the same room as Donald Trump.
At a Spectrum News NY1 debate on Wednesday, June 3, the three leading Democrats in the 7th Congressional District primary, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, state Assemblywoman Claire Valdez and Queens City Councilwoman Julie Won, all said they would not do what Mayor Zohran Mamdani has now done twice: sit across from Trump in the Oval Office. Reynoso, who had already criticized Mamdani’s ICE response timeline last month, put the sharpest point on it. “I don’t think we should be visiting the White House and talking to Trump,” Reynoso said, per NY1. “This guy is terrorizing our neighbors. He’s committing crimes, war crimes. He’s somebody that we should be getting ready to impeach.”
Won, on the same stage, kept it shorter. “Neither Donald Trump or Zohran Mamdani are kings of this city,” she said, according to NY1. They were reacting to one trip. Mamdani went to Washington on February 26 to pitch Trump, a man who spent decades as a New York real estate developer, on a plan to build more than 12,000 new homes in the city, his second White House sit-down with the president after a first meeting back in November.
Mamdani came back from that February meeting with a name. While he was in the room, Department of Homeland Security agents had detained a 29-year-old Columbia senior, Elmina “Ellie” Aghayeva, an Azerbaijani student studying neuroscience and political science. Federal agents told building security they were police searching for a missing child to get inside her off-campus apartment around 6 a.m., according to ABC7 and Columbia’s acting president Claire Shipman, who said a public safety officer asked repeatedly for a warrant that the agents never produced. Mamdani raised her case directly with Trump. Hours later, Trump told him she would be released “imminently,” and she was out by that afternoon.
So when Reynoso called the White House visits indefensible, Mamdani answered with Aghayeva. Responding to reporters the same day, the mayor said, “I’ll leave it to the borough president to explain why he would prefer a New Yorker continue to be unjustly detained by ICE, than I meet with the president in the Oval Office to secure their release,” as first surfaced in our earlier reporting and covered by the New York Post. The disagreement is real. Reynoso is arguing that legitimizing Trump with a meeting is the larger harm. Mamdani is arguing that a meeting got a student out of a cell the same day. The primary is partly a referendum on which one you weigh heavier.
Reynoso and Mamdani used to be on the same side. Reynoso, long tied to the Working Families Party, was an early endorser of Mamdani’s mayoral run. Mamdani did not return the favor when Reynoso jumped into the congressional race. He endorsed Valdez instead, a fellow Democratic Socialists of America member, one of three congressional endorsements the mayor made this cycle. Mamdani also backed Darializa Avila Chevalier over Rep. Adriano Espaillat in the 13th District covering Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, even though Espaillat had endorsed Mamdani in the 2025 general election. In both races the mayor chose the DSA-aligned challenger over the more established ally. That looks like strategy, not coincidence.
The institutional left is split along the same seam. District Council 37, New York City’s largest public-sector union, endorsed Reynoso, and Velázquez herself is backing him to keep her seat. Valdez has Mamdani and the DSA. The polling explains the nerves. An Emerson College/PIX11 survey of 350 likely Democratic primary voters, conducted May 16 and 17, found Valdez at 23 percent, Reynoso at 21 percent and Won at 13 percent, a statistical tie inside a 5.2-point margin of error, with 43 percent still undecided. The same poll found Mamdani himself approved of by 78 percent of those primary voters, which is why his judgment is worth fighting about on a debate stage at all.
The split runs by age too. Emerson found voters under 40 backing Valdez over Reynoso 33 percent to 15 percent, while voters over 50 flipped it for Reynoso, 27 percent to 13 percent. The Mamdani question maps onto a generational divide about how confrontational the left should be with a president most of the district despises.
One Democratic operative described the Reynoso-Mamdani breach to the New York Post as unproductive. Two of the most prominent progressives in Brooklyn are now spending oxygen on each other weeks before a primary that decides who carries Velázquez’s seat. The field is bigger than those two. Alongside Reynoso, Valdez and Won, public defender Vichal Kumar is also on the ballot, per Fox 5.
The 7th District Democratic primary is June 23, and in a district this blue the primary is effectively the election. With 43 percent of voters undecided and the top two inside the margin of error, this one is up for grabs, and the Trump-meeting question is one of the few real dividing lines on a stage where the candidates agree on almost everything else. NY1’s full debate coverage is where Reynoso, Valdez and Won laid out where they stand on Mamdani, Trump and ICE, and Fox 5’s candidate guide runs through the full ballot, Kumar included, so you know who you are choosing among on June 23.
Featured image: The White House (Public Domain)
