Claire Valdez wants to dismantle Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Her father has spent decades working for an engineering firm that designs and upgrades border enforcement facilities for the federal government in Texas.

Valdez, a Democratic congressional candidate running in New York's 7th Congressional District, lists "Abolish ICE" as a core plank of her campaign. Her website pledges she will "fight to dismantle and abolish ICE" and "push for real immigration reform that legalizes the status of millions of immigrant Americans." She has drawn backing from Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York political figure Zohran Mamdani, who has helped elevate her candidacy in the race to replace retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez.

But as the New York Post reported, her father Larry Valdez works as a civil engineer at Parkhill Smith & Cooper, a firm that has contracted with the Department of Homeland Security and Border Patrol to build and fortify the very infrastructure his daughter wants torn down.

The contracts behind the contradiction

Parkhill Smith & Cooper completed a $172,000 contract in 2009 for the build-out of a 74-acre border facility in Marfa, Texas. Two years later, the firm added more than $72,000 in security upgrades to the same facility. That site later became known as "Big Bend" and grew into a focal point for immigration enforcement under the Trump administration.

The firm's border work extended beyond Texas. Parkhill designed the Falcon Lakes Project for DHS in Norma, Oklahoma. The company's own website described the project in detail, noting it "involved navigating strict security clearances and technology restrictions, such as drone prohibitions."

Larry Valdez is described as the firm's longest-tenured employee. The Post reported he was pictured alongside a Customs and Border Protection jet, a detail that underscores his proximity to the federal border apparatus his daughter campaigns against.

The Trump administration sent 500 soldiers to border facilities in 2025, a deployment that produced a 74% decrease in apprehensions compared to the two previous fiscal years. Marfa's Big Bend facility, the one Parkhill helped build, sat at the center of that enforcement surge.

Valdez responds, carefully

When pressed on the apparent tension between her platform and her father's career, Claire Valdez offered a statement that acknowledged his employment but steered away from the border contracts themselves:

"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."

She added that her father spent 25 of those years focused on regional airports. That claim raises its own question: what occupied the other 20 years? The Post's reporting documents Parkhill's border facility work during that broader window, but neither Valdez nor her campaign addressed her father's specific involvement in those projects.

Larry Valdez himself did not provide any public comment.

The company behind the curtain

Parkhill Smith & Cooper operates from more than a dozen offices and employs hundreds of people, according to Claire Valdez's own characterization. The firm's Lubbock office, where Larry Valdez works, sits in deep-red West Texas, far from the Brooklyn and Queens precincts where his daughter is courting progressive voters.

The firm's portfolio is not limited to border work. But the contracts it has held with DHS and Border Patrol are not incidental side projects. They involved designing facilities, installing security upgrades, and conducting survey work under strict federal clearance requirements. These are the physical structures that make border enforcement possible, the walls, fences, surveillance systems, and processing centers that groups like ICE rely on to operate.

The gap between what Valdez campaigns on and what her family profits from is not a matter of interpretation. It is a matter of public contracts and public statements, sitting side by side. The pattern of progressive candidates whose personal circumstances clash with their public positions has become a recurring theme in Democratic politics.

The race and its backers

New York's 7th Congressional District seat opened when Velázquez announced her retirement. The primary has drawn at least two notable candidates: Valdez and Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who carries Velázquez's endorsement.

Valdez, by contrast, has aligned herself with the party's furthest-left flank. Mamdani's backing places her squarely in the democratic-socialist wing that has gained influence in New York City politics. Sanders' endorsement reinforces that positioning. Bishop Robert Barron recently labeled both Sanders and Mamdani "borderline communists" and warned that the Democratic Party has drifted dangerously to the left, a characterization that Valdez's "Abolish ICE" platform does little to dispute.

Mamdani's involvement carries its own backstory. His relationship with Velázquez reportedly soured, creating an ongoing rift that now plays out through the proxy contest between Valdez and Reynoso. The race has become a test of whether the democratic-socialist wing can capture another New York congressional seat, or whether the party's establishment lane still holds.

The broader Democratic coalition continues to wrestle with its own internal fractures. Sen. John Fetterman has warned his own party that its messaging is alienating entire voter blocs, and the Valdez candidacy illustrates a different dimension of the same problem: candidates whose rhetoric runs so far ahead of reality that the contradictions become impossible to ignore.

What the numbers show

The financial trail is straightforward. Parkhill's Marfa contract alone totaled $172,000 in 2009. The 2011 security upgrades added another $72,000-plus. The Falcon Lakes Project for DHS represented additional federal revenue. These are not trivial sums for an engineering firm, and they represent ongoing relationships with the very agencies Valdez wants abolished.

Claire Valdez's statement that her father focused on airports for a quarter-century does not account for the firm's documented border work during his long tenure. Whether Larry Valdez personally drafted blueprints for the Marfa facility or the Falcon Lakes survey remains unclear. But his status as the firm's longest-tenured employee means he was present through every phase of Parkhill's border contracting history.

The candidate has not explained how she reconciles her call to abolish ICE with the fact that her own family has benefited financially from the federal border enforcement system. Nor has she addressed whether she views her father's employer's work as part of what she calls "Trump's inhuman immigration policies." Other Democratic candidates in Texas and beyond have faced similar scrutiny when their stated positions collided with their personal records.

The quiet math of abolition

Abolishing ICE is not a symbolic gesture. It would mean dismantling an agency with thousands of employees, billions in annual funding, and operational responsibility for immigration enforcement, human trafficking investigations, and customs operations. The facilities that firms like Parkhill design and upgrade would go dark, or be repurposed for something else entirely.

For Claire Valdez, the call to abolish ICE is a campaign promise. For her father's employer, ICE and its sister agencies represent paying clients. The 74-acre facility in Marfa exists because companies like Parkhill built it, maintained it, and upgraded its security. The 74% drop in apprehensions that followed the Trump administration's 2025 troop deployment happened in part because that infrastructure was already in place.

Valdez may genuinely believe ICE should be abolished. But the money that helped put her in a position to run for Congress flowed, at least in part, from the same enforcement apparatus she now denounces.

In politics, you can campaign against the system. You just shouldn't expect voters not to notice when your family helped build it.