Claire Valdez wants to tear down Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Her father spent 45 years drawing a paycheck from an engineering firm that built and upgraded border facilities for the very agencies she promises to dismantle.
Valdez, a congressional candidate running for New York's 7th District, lists "Abolish ICE and Protect Immigrants" as a centerpiece of her campaign. She has pledged to "open up borders" and push legislation to legalize "millions of immigrant Americans." Her backers include Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and a roster of progressive heavyweights.
But as the New York Post reported, her father Larry Valdez works for Parkhill Smith & Cooper, a Texas-based engineering firm responsible for a string of Border Patrol projects across western Texas, including a sprawling 74-acre facility in Marfa that became a frontline post for immigration enforcement under President Trump.
Parkhill won a $172,000 contract in 2009 to build out the Marfa border facility. The firm returned in 2011 to add more than $72,000 in security upgrades to the same site. That facility, now known as Big Bend, became a hotbed for enforcement after the Trump administration sent 500 soldiers there in 2025, a deployment that produced a 74 percent decrease in apprehensions compared with the two previous fiscal years.
Parkhill's work for the federal government did not stop in Texas. The firm's own website boasts of designing the Falcon Lakes Project for the Department of Homeland Security in Norma, Oklahoma. The company described the project as requiring "strict security clearances and technology restrictions, such as drone prohibitions." That is not the language of a firm dabbling in government work. It is the résumé of a contractor embedded in the national-security apparatus.
And Larry Valdez is no rank-and-file employee. He is Parkhill's longest-tenured worker, having spent his entire career at the firm's Lubbock, Texas, office.
When the Post pressed Valdez on the gap between her platform and her father's employer, she offered a statement that acknowledged Larry Valdez's career while sidestepping the broader question.
"For 45 years, my father worked as a civil engineer in the Lubbock office of Parkill, a firm with hundreds of employees across more than a dozen offices. I'm proud of him and my record of opposing Trump's inhuman immigration policies."
Valdez told the Post her father "had no involvement in the two projects cited", the Marfa facility and the Falcon Lakes effort. She said his work over the past 25 years focused mainly on regional airports. She did not, however, dispute that Parkhill itself carried out those border contracts. And she did not comment on a photo showing her father pictured with a Customs and Border Protection jet.
The distinction she draws is narrow. Her father may not have personally designed the Marfa guard post or the Oklahoma DHS project. But he collected a salary for decades from a firm whose portfolio includes exactly the kind of border-security infrastructure she campaigns against. The money that paid for the Valdez household came, in part, from the same federal enforcement machine Claire Valdez now calls "inhuman."
The Valdez story fits neatly into a broader pattern around her chief political sponsor. Mayor Mamdani has made a brand of progressive absolutism, and a habit of falling short of it. His private courtship of Wall Street donors clashed with his public "tax the rich" rhetoric. His record at City Hall has drawn scrutiny for gaps between bold promises and actual results.
Mamdani's own background has invited questions about consistency. Fox News reported that Mamdani identified as Black and Asian on his Columbia University application, a detail that raised eyebrows given his public biography. The pattern is familiar: say whatever the moment requires, and hope no one checks the receipts.
The mayor's endorsement of Valdez has also fractured alliances within the New York left. Retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez, who holds the 7th District seat, backs Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso for the job. Velázquez and Mamdani were once political allies. That relationship ruptured over his decision to back Valdez instead of Reynoso, an ongoing rift that reveals how personal ambition, not principle, drives the endorsement game.
Mamdani's first 100 days in office were marked by broken promises on housing vouchers and homeless sweeps. His decision to skip the Israel Day Parade broke a 61-year mayoral tradition and deepened divisions with the city's Jewish community. These are not isolated missteps. They form a record, one that should concern voters being asked to trust the candidates he elevates.
Claire Valdez's campaign platform states plainly what she would do in Congress:
"In Congress, Claire Valdez will fight to dismantle and abolish ICE. She will push for real immigration reform that legalizes the status of millions of immigrant Americans."
That is her right. Voters can evaluate the merits of abolishing a federal law-enforcement agency. But voters also deserve to know whether a candidate's convictions are genuine or merely convenient, and the Parkhill connection raises that question squarely.
Valdez has made no public mention of her father's decades-long employment at a firm that built border infrastructure for the agencies she wants eliminated. She did not volunteer the information. She addressed it only when a reporter asked. And even then, her answer was crafted to minimize rather than explain.
The open questions are obvious. Did Valdez know about Parkhill's Border Patrol and DHS contracts before the Post inquiry? If so, why did she never disclose the connection? If not, what does that say about her grasp of the very issue she has made the centerpiece of her campaign? And what was the context of her father's appearance alongside a CBP jet?
Meanwhile, the facility her father's firm helped build is producing results. The Big Bend post in Marfa, the same site Parkhill constructed and upgraded, saw apprehensions drop 74 percent after the Trump administration reinforced it with 500 soldiers. That is enforcement working. That is the system Claire Valdez wants to dismantle.
Voters in New York's 7th District face a choice shaped by the consequences of progressive governance they can already see playing out across the city. The Valdez campaign offers them another version of the same formula: grand promises untethered from the messy realities that pay the bills.
It turns out that even abolishing ICE is easier to campaign on when someone in the family has been cashing checks from the border-security business for four and a half decades.
