To understand the outsized role immigration has taken in the race for New York’s Sixth Congressional District, consider the candidates’ responses to the detention of a 6-year-old Queens student and her mother after an immigration hearing last year.
Chuck Park said that he sought to rally behind the family and undocumented neighbors , but the staff at Rep. Grace Meng’s office instructed him via email that the mother and child — who were shipped to a detention center in Texas — had to fill out an intake form.
“At that moment I knew Representative Meng did not feel the urgency of this moment,” said Park, who is challenging Meng for her congressional seat in the district’s Democratic primary. “These are not normal times.”
Meng disputed Park’s characterization of their response and accused him of either misunderstanding congressional protocol or deliberately misrepresenting the incident. The form, Meng said, was a Federal Privacy Act release, which congressional offices must obtain before intervening with federal agencies on behalf of constituents. She went on to introduce a bill inspired by the family’s plight to allow remote immigration check-ins.
“My office fights these cases every single day, within the law and alongside the local advocates and elected officials in the trenches with us,” Meng told Documented, “whether or not there’s a press release attached.”
Park, who once campaigned for Meng, has made immigration the centerpiece of his platform against the seven-term incumbent. The challenge comes at a possible inflection point for the district. While President Trump gained ground there during the presidential election, fears over immigration enforcements and cost of living have created an opening for Democratic leaders vowing more action.
New York’s 6th Congressional District includes parts of Queens, including Forest Hills, Corona and Elmhurst, and 55% of its residents are foreign born, according to U.S. Census data. Nearly half of residents are Asian, while 26% are Hispanic — a group that has been disproportionately affected by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests statewide.
Meng has represented Queens in Congress since becoming the first Asian American from New York to be elected in 2013, and has generally been aligned with the moderate wing of the Democratic party. She has supported major Biden-era legislative priorities, including the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, a McCarthy–Biden compromise that established new discretionary spending limits as part of a debt ceiling agreement. She’s also received endorsements from a broad coalition of labor unions, major LGBTQ+ groups, and NY politicians, including Councilmember Shekar Krishnan, who Park used to work for.
Park, meanwhile, has aligned himself with the progressive wing of the party, and supports universal health care and abolishing ICE. He has criticized Meng for taking a softer approach to the enforcement agency, even signing onto a resolution in 2025 that thanked ICE agents “for protecting the homeland.”
The contest between Meng and Park reflects a national trend where progressive candidates emerged to challenge established politicians, following the wins of NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani last year and Chris Rabb, a progressive who won the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District last month.
Park said his grassroots campaign has knocked on more than 50,000 doors in the district since launching in late November. He has hosted numerous town halls to speak with constituents in the district, and, he said, unsuccessfully invited Meng to debate him. Meng said that the pair had debates scheduled but that organizers pulled out at the last minute.
Both candidates, like many in the district, are the children of immigrants.
Park’s parents emigrated from South Korea in 1980 and worked as street vendors on Canal Street while raising five children. That income allowed them to buy a home and put their kids through college, he said. After college, Park spent a decade as a foreign service officer for the U.S. State Department.
“We believed in what I think is the foundational promise of this country, which is, you come here, you work hard, and in return this country will give you a home and a future. My parents believe that,” Park said. “I believe that promise is under attack, and it is not being broken by us because we are still working hard.”
Meng is the daughter of Chinese immigrants, and her father is former New York State Assemblymember Jimmy Meng. She said her office has a track record of assisting immigrants during Trump’s crackdown, including helping recently with the release of a constituent from Corona who had been pulled off a Transportation Security Administration line and detained, even though the person had no criminal record and was in the U.S. legally. “This didn’t get headlines, nor should we have, but it’s an example of how we have worked to assist constituents who have encountered ICE and stopped families from being separated,” Meng told Documented.
Immigration has been central to the two candidates’ campaigns, and was front and center at a recent candidate forum on June 8, hosted by the South Asian & Indo-Caribbean Democratic Club of New York. Both candidates — Meng through a pre-recorded video because she was in Washington, D.C., for a vote, and Park in person— said immigration was a top priority for this moment, a sentiment that resonated with some of the attendees.
Forest Hills resident Yolanda Vega, who is the director of a Head Start program in Corona, said at the forum the immigration enforcement in Queens reminded her of Nazi Germany. “They would come at 5 or 4 o’clock in the morning and kick their doors,” she said of the ICE raids in the neighborhood. “People would huddle in the last room, farthest from the door. They would keep the children quiet.”
Vega said that her organization, which serves 132 families, had to create new procedures to deal with ICE after hearing many stories from parents and children in the program. “These children are being terrorized, and this is our future generation, and this is who we are raising, children in pure terror, so please help with that,” she said, questioning Park about how he would gather enough support in Congress to pass legislation that would limit ICE operations.
Park responded by saying that politicians aren’t the only people who can take action. He encouraged neighbors to get involved in mutual aid, Signal chats, and rapid-response networks. Moreover, he said he believed that current members of Congress did not have what it takes to put a stop on ICE.
“They’re totally deluded about what it will take. And then the most frustrating thing is, it’s not just Republicans, it’s Democrats. It’s Democrats who think all it will take is, ‘Hey, show your badge and things will be fine,’ and they won’t stop kicking down your door and grabbing a mom or a dad, right?” he said, taking a jab at the ICE Badge Visibility Act, which Meng sponsored and introduced last July.
Meng rejected the notion that her office has not responded aggressively enough to heightened immigration enforcement. “What is happening to them right now is wrong, and my office has been on the front lines,” Meng told Documented. She added that on top of the legislation she has introduced, her office has connected constituents with legal resources and worked directly with families facing detention.
Last month, Meng introduced the Safe Check-Ins For Immigrants Act. If passed, the bill would allow immigrants to do their required check-ins with the agency remotely. “When a six-year-old girl from Elmhurst and her mother were detained after showing up to a required check-in, it didn’t just break my heart; it became the Safe Check-Ins for Immigrants Act,” Meng said.
Documented asked Park how his progressive platform could win in a district where 46% of voters cast ballots for Trump in 2024, a 9% increase from 2020. “The way I’m going to reach them is to not gaslight them. I need to acknowledge what they feel and that I feel, which is that the system is broken. They’re not imagining it,” Park said.
He believes the ground Trump gained in 2024 was due to his campaign acknowledging that low-income and middle-class families were struggling with the cost of living. But he doesn’t think the voters support Trump’s agenda of immigration enforcement or U.S. military action in places like Venezuela or Gaza.
“I don’t think that’s what this district wants,” he said. “That’s not what they voted for when they went right. I think they voted for change and they voted to fix a broken system.”
