“After what happened last Saturday in Bushwick,” said Christian Celeste Tate (pictured above), a local community organizer, to a crowd of DSA members at Starr Bar (214 Starr St.) “I am not okay.”

“Justice for Mr. Okeke,” an event organized by the DSA’s Immigrant Justice Working Group, might’ve been rained out of its original location at Maria Hernandez Park, but they carried on anyway. Tate, the party’s candidate for the New York State Assembly’s 54th District,¹ emceed for a crowd of DSA members, delivering his opening speech before other members of the DSA slate, including congressional candidate Claire Valdez, currently in the New York State Assembly. Valdez later took the stage to denounce perceived NYPD collaboration with ICE during last week’s detainment of Chidozie Wilson Okeke.

After Okeke was detained and injured by ICE agents on May 2nd, he was transported to Wyckoff Heights Medical Center (374 Stockholm St.), where protestors that night congregated, leading to an intervention by the NYPD that, depending on who you asked, may or may not have constituted collaboration between local police and federal immigration authorities, prohibited by the city’s sanctuary city laws.

The crowd of some fifty people were universally opposed to immigration raids in Bushwick, with Game of Thrones-esque chants of “Shame” at mentions of ICE or the NYPD. Tate channeled their frustration: “If a politician ever tells you that they’re coming to make it better, and to take care of you, fuck that. What we need are elected leaders that understand, as Bushwick understands, that power belongs to the people.”

Tate is primarying incumbent Erik Martin Dilan², who might face a similar fate to father Martin Malave Dilan, who democratic socialist Julia Salazar successfully primaried in 2018 in the adjoining 18th district of the State Senate. He’s also been endorsed by City Councilwomen Sandy Nurse and Jennifer Gutiérrez (both representing Bushwick.)

One attendee, Jo—a heritage New Yorker and a canvasser for Tate’s campaign—said, “I think that corralling and pushing away protestors from being able to protect our people, who are getting kidnapped… is helping out ICE.” Asked how City Hall could act, Jo said that Mayor Mamdani has an “obligation to figure out… ways to make sure that ICE has no place in the city,” along with voicing support for Councilman Chi Ossé’s CURB act, which would reduce the NYPD’s capacity to deploy their Strategic Response Group at protests like the one in Bushwick.

Jo continued: “Allies in office who say they are against ICE, they’re not putting in the work to make sure they’re kicked out of our communities. Chanting ‘ICE out’ is meaningless,” a dig at Valdez’s main primary rival, Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who was outside Wyckoff Heights the day after the protest to also chant, “Abolish ICE.”

Other speakers included two State Assembly candidates from Ridgewood: Samantha Kattan, running to succeed Valdez in District 37; and David Orkin, running in District 38 against longtime Eric Adams ally Jennifer Rajkumar, who Orkin has accused of forging petition signatures to claim her spot on the ballot. (Orkin’s campaign sued Rajkumar, though the case was dropped on procedural grounds, which Orkin’s campaign intends to appeal.)

Congressional candidate Claire Valdez said, “We have to abolish ICE. That’s absolutely the floor here.” Valdez also said of the agency, “We’re spending billions of our taxpayer dollars funding these masked agents coming into our communities, tearing people out of their cars, out of their homes, disappearing them to extrajudicial prisons.”

Regarding the NYPD’s presence at the protest in Bushwick, she added: “We need a real investigation to make sure the NYPD is not collaborating with ICE, [and] that they’re following our Sanctuary City laws.” When asked if Mayor Zohran Mamdani should keep Jessica Tisch as NYPD Commissioner, Valdez was direct: “No.”

It was an event full of small formalities: Valdez joked about how she couldn’t curse, presumably a rule from campaign handlers that Tate was verifiably not beholden to. The calls to action seemed like a running joke among the DSA candidates, and there were many: join DSA, lodge complaints on Governor Hochul’s phone lines, and advocate for New York 4 All (A3506B, co-sponsored by State Senator Salazar, from Bushwick and not present), which would materially limit local police’s ability to detain undocumented residents.

Multiple speakers paid deference to District 37 Councilwoman Sandy Nurse, who was among the crowd watching the protest that night, and the first to deliver a statement about it. The councilwoman has endorsed Tate (and Orkin), but not Valdez (she elected to endorse her competitor Reynoso). Nurse was listed as a speaker at the event, but did not speak or appear to attend.

To many, what happened in Bushwick was perceived as a failure on Mayor Mamdani’s part. At the local level, the immediate resistance to ICE—an agency that’s younger than most residents—provided a sense of hope. Prior to taking the stage, Tate told me, “The way we have seen Bushwick residents show up for each other is just so core to what makes Bushwick ‘Bushwick.’ This is an incredibly diverse, multicolored, multilingual community, and yet we understand what solidarity means. We understand there is more that connects than there is that divides us. Solidarity is that language. We’re here to carry on that tradition. We’re not the first to do it,” he continued. “We’re on the shoulders of Bushwick organizers that organized their way through gang violence and blackouts and overpolicing to where we are today, and we’re carrying that mantle forward.”

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1. AD 54 includes parts of East New York (Cypress Hills, City Line) and a significant portion of eastern Bushwick (east of Gates along the J Line, and along the L from Halsey to Bushwick-Aberdeen). See here for a map. ↩︎
2. Dilan is neither particularly beloved nor well-known, and I can personally confirm he hires third-party canvassers, one of whom knocked on my door about a week ago to drop off a flyer (they didn’t care enough about it to know who I could talk to on his campaign team). ↩︎