After playing an essential role in Zohran Mamdani’s historic mayoral victory last year, New York City DSA is running its largest-ever slate with 10 challengers contesting various legislative and congressional seats across the city. In Assembly District 38 in Queens, a crescent-shaped district that runs from Ridgewood to Glendale, Woodhaven, Ozone Park and Richmond Hill, immigrant workers rights attorney David Orkin is running against Jenifer Rajkumar to represent a heavily immigrant district where fear of ICE is pervasive. Rajkumar was a close political ally of Eric Adams best known for regularly showing up at the former mayor’s press conferences wearing a bright red dress. 

Orkin recently joined us on The Indypendent News Hour, which airs Tuesdays 5-6 pm on WBAI-99.5 FM, and spoke with co-hosts John Tarleton and Amba Guerguerian about his campaign and what he thinks AD 38 is looking for in a representative. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.  

The Indypendent News Hour: Tell us about your background and why you think it has prepared you to serve your district in the New York State Assembly?

David Orkin: I am an immigrant workers rights attorney here at Queens, and also a union organizer. I do employment and labor law representing low-wage workers who are victims of wage theft, sexual harassment and increasingly retaliation by employers who are threatening their workers with calling ICE in response to the workers voicing any concern about what’s going on at work, whether it’s non-payment of wages or other labor abuses. 

I have a very unique position of having worked for many years at an organization called Make the Road New York at their office in Bushwick. I live in Ridgewood, Queens, just down the street. My clients, who are exclusively low-wage immigrant workers are also people who are my neighbors, people who live in District 38, people who live in Queens and on the other side, in Brooklyn, and people who are experiencing the worst of the repression that the federal government is doling out right now; not only in the terms of ICE raids and separation of families and people being forcibly removed; but also emboldened employers who feel more confident in abusing immigrant workers in this heightened and fearful environment. I know the district through their eyes. 

My mom is an immigrant from Mexico, and part of her family’s migration story is having lived on both sides of the US-Mexico border in Tijuana and San Diego. She lived most of her childhood in Tijuana. I have specific memories of going with my mom to her childhood home, crossing the border. As a child I remember feeling the terror and the fear of the militarized border apparatus, and the border crossing. Having so many questions about that as an adult, led me to return to the US-Mexico border as a young adult, to the Arizona borderlands, where I worked for many years, doing humanitarian aid, trying to alleviate the humanitarian crisis of people perishing in the desert, trying to cross the border for lack of water, and also working in the detention centers in central Arizona, trying to get queer and trans people out of detention and then also working in migrant shelters in Mexico, after which I transitioned to a legal career.

Can you paint a picture of AD 38 for people who are not familiar with that corner of the city?

This is such a diverse and incredible part of Queens. District 38 encompasses Ridgewood, Glendale, Woodhaven, and parts of Richmond to Hill and Ozone Park. Those are parts of Queens that are very diverse in so many ways. Not only are more than 50% of people who live in this district immigrants from all over the world, there’s also a lot of diversity in terms of class, people’s backgrounds, even their political opinions. 

I’ll give you an example, if you are on Wyckoff Avenue, walking from Myrtle-Wyckoff, the big train station down the street, you’re going to pass the Ridgewood Islamic Center on one side and a nightclub on the other side, and a Bodega selling tacos, the first delicious delicacy of central Mexico. Then you’ll get to the Nepali Hindu temple. At the end, you’ll find some of the biggest nightclubs in New York City. You have people from all over the world who have moved here looking for opportunity, and also artists who are creating music and artwork that is seen and appreciated all around the world. It is an incredible, incredible collection of people here. 

In your estimation, what has been lacking in the record of Jenifer Rajkumar that makes you believe that she needs to be replaced?

The gap between what my clients and community members are experiencing on the one hand and our assembly member’s priorities on the other hand is the reason why I’m stepping up for office. 

This is the heart of the working class of Queens and our incumbent has sought elected office for her own personal gain.  At the very least, you would expect that an elected official would listen to you, and this is not something that we can even expect from our assembly person. Besides missed legislative opportunities, she consistently sides with the interests of her wealthy donors over the people of Queens. She’s extraordinarily corrupt. She was the only person who defended Eric Adams when he was indicted on corruption charges. 

You may have heard we recently challenged her in court because we found a massive fraud scheme in her petition signatures, which included up to over 1,000 potentially forged signatures on. Every single day, I’m receiving news from different people in the district who are concerned that their signatures have been forged. Sometimes their signatures are forged two or three times.

Including the editor of a local newspaper, the Queens Chronicle which is covering this race.

Not only the editor, but the editor of the South Queens section of the Queens Chronicle, who wrote one of the first stories about the fraud case that was brought against my opponent. You can just tell the kind of politics that my opponent is interested in engaging in, where she doesn’t mind literally defrauding our neighbors for her own personal gain.

She ran for office several times in lower Manhattan. Couldn’t get elected, and she moved to this district in order to run for office and take advantage of the extreme neglect that the political machine has inflicted upon this part of Queens. This part of Queens has really serious needs. There isn’t a single bike lane in this part of South Queens. This is where the bike delivery people of New York City live. This is not about me wanting a bike lane to the beach. This is about worker safety. Many car accidents happen on these streets. 

There are very few options for affordable housing. There are many cramped houses, multi-generational families in one house. The list goes on. While all this was happening, she was uptown with Eric Adams, campaigning on the Upper East Side trying to raise money for a failed Public Advocate race. It is so deeply hurtful to me that the people in this area have such desperate needs, and they have been manipulated and taken advantage of by somebody who really does not care about them.

Speaking of those needs, what are you hearing from residents as you’re out on the campaign trail, and how is that reflected in your agenda, your platform?

I am hearing a lot about the things that I was concerned with at the start of the campaign, primarily the presence of ICE. The fear of ICE is really pervasive throughout the district, and it is not enough to be someone who co-signs a bill. You have to be a champion. What that means is bringing it up when other Democratic members of the Assembly are meeting in conference, pushing other people to sign on, pushing the governor, pushing Speaker Carl Heastie to sign on. 

One of the main reasons I decided to run for office is that this is where the precarious app based workers of Queens live. I mentioned delivery workers. This is also where the Uber and Lyft drivers of New York live. This is where the DoorDash delivered people of New York live. If you go into Richmond Hill, where I’ve been spending a lot of time, every other car is a yellow cab, and there is nobody in Albany who is saying app-based workers need more rights. The labor law hasn’t been updated to accommodate and to consider the ways in which technology companies are recreating our economy and the way that employment works for their benefit. We need somebody to represent the workers’ interests.

There are currently nine Democratic Socialists set in the state legislature by next year. If this year’s slate of DSA candidates can run the table, there could be as many as 16 Democratic Socialists in the state legislature come January 2027. What do you see as the advantages of working through an organized bloc of Democratic Socialists that coordinates with DSA organizers back here in the city? Walk us through that process and tell us why you think that’s a good way to go. Also, why do you identify as a Democratic Socialist?  Why is that important for you to put that out there?

I’m a proud democratic socialist, because I believe that the economy should serve working people. Workers create the wealth of the ruling classes, and we need more power and state government in order to redistribute that power. It’s not just about redistributing wealth, it’s about redistributing power. 

I would only be running for office if I were doing so as a member of the DSA slate and as a future SiO (Socialist in Office). I want everyone to imagine what it’s like to go to Albany as a freshman assembly person. You have two staff, maybe another part-time communications person. You are thrown into this ocean without a life raft. You have to swim, and you do that by shaking hands and making deals and playing along and agreeing to things that may betray your values so that you can gain a foothold. And soon you work your way up.

But when you are an SiO, and when you’re with the DSA, you have the support of this incredible body, not of just the other SiO’s you are organizing with and working with, but also the incredible resource that is New York City DSA. People helping you do research on legislation. People helping you craft legislation. People helping you make connections with unions and other movement organizations to exert pressure on the overall body of the State Assembly and State Senate to get things done. 

There are currently nine democratic socialists in the state legislature, but they have an outsized influence because of the way that they’re able to work together. If we’re able to increase our numbers, by six potentially or even more if we include the Senate, then we really send a message to the rest of New York and the rest of the country about what kind of politics appeals to working people and what kind of politics can get things done.

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