The problem you have it that each iteration calls iterator(), which returns a NEW Iterator .

Things are getting weird past this point, since the iterator has a current field storing the current record, and of course the current record of a new iterator is null .

In that case it calls getNextRecord() from CSVParser (source code), thus skipping a line .

If you want to stick with the iterator, just re-use the same instance :

Iterator<CSVRecord> iterator = parser.iterator();

while(iterator.hasNext()) { 
    console.log(iterator.next().get(0).trim());
}

Given the below function that I found on geeksforgeeks.com

public static <T> List<T> getListFromIterator(Iterator<T> iterator) { 
    Iterable<T> iterable = () -> iterator; 

    return StreamSupport 
              .stream(iterable.spliterator(), false) 
              .collect(Collectors.toList()); 
} 

and the fact that you can get an iterator from CVSRecords you can do

List<String> list = getListFromIterator(records.get(0).iterator());

You can simply iterate over the resulting records and access the i-th item of a record via record.get(i), e.g.

    Reader in = new StringReader(
            "DAR_123451                  ,\"XXXXX Hello World Hello World XXX \"\n" +
            "DAR_123452                  ,\"XXXXX Hello World Hello World XXX \"");
    Iterable<CSVRecord> records = CSVFormat.DEFAULT.parse(in);
    for (CSVRecord record : records) {
        for (int i = 0; i < record.size(); i++) {
            System.out.println("At " + i + ": " + record.get(i));
        }
    }

boolean firstRound = true;
for (CSVRecord csvRecord : csvParser) {
    if(firstRound){
        firstRound = false;
    } else {
        String name = csvRecord.get(0);
        dates_csv.add(name);
    }
}

or

List<CSVRecord> recList = csvParser.getRecords();
for(int i = 1; i < recList.size(); i++){
    dates_csv.add(recList.get(i).get(0));
}