The story of a recent Saturday night in Bushwick now has its own Wikipedia page. It begins, on tape at least, with prolonged, horrific shrieks. Footage posted by The City captures the scene in the area after Chidoze Wilson Okeke was abducted from his car by ICE agents for overstaying a 2023 tourist visa.
That footage features an agent pointing his taser at Okeke, followed by a trio of ICE agents wrestling him from his car. An “an unnamed spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security” later told The City that “this criminal was NOT tased by law enforcement,” adding that Okeke “became physically combative, attempting to punch and elbow ICE officers” and “weaponized his vehicle to attempt to hit ICE officers.” (A similar claim made to events preceding the killing of Renée Good in Minneapolis).
“Our officers followed their training and used the minimum amount of force,” the spokesperson continued.
Ivan Carrion, a local 35-year-old, told the City that ICE agents were “choking [Okeke], hitting him, trying to get him out of the car,” and had bashed in his windows and used a knife to cut him out of his seatbelt, before abducting him and driving away with his car.
Around 9pm, activists began gathering outside Wyckoff Hospital after spotting an ICE minivan. Okeke had been brought there after he “requested medical treatment,” per one account. (Steve Auerbach, from the the group Health Justice for New York is cited in a BKReader report as claiming his group is “seeing repeated cases of ICE bringing detainees to hospitals after harming them.”)
A report from Cole Sinanian in Brooklyn Downtown Star identified a “locally known ICE agent Brendan Cuni and his unidentified partner” as being involved. Cuni is a baby-faced sort of Forrest Gump of ICE who has been frequently spotted around Bushwick wielding a gun, and was involved in the agency’s violent crack down in Minneapolis earlier this year, as well as other major ICE episodes like the Canal Street vendor raids in Manhattan, per his listing on a DHS monitoring website called ICE List.
Footage taken around 10:15 p.m. that night, and posted later on YouTube, captures a blockade of over a dozen protestors surrounding 2 ICE cars and obstructing the end of the street with garbage cans. Toward the end, a fleet of NYPD cars shows up, setting the scene for the next few hours.
Located off the DeKalb L stop, Wyckoff Hospital is a hotbed of Saturday night activity, surrounded by bars full of people drinking and doomscrolling. While many may have been alerted by the discrete network of social media ICE watchers, others were simply drawn to the growing sound of whistles and chants.
“I was in my apartment a block away and I just heard the ICE whistles. I recognized the whistles from videos on social media so I ran outside to see what was going on,” Ian, a nearby resident, told me.
“I find it hard to believe that it was 200 [people],” said Hamayel Qureshi, another Bushwick resident, who doubted reports of the size of the crowd. “It could have been at some point, if you’re counting all the people just like passing by.”
“The cops were just laughing and bro-ing out the whole time we were standing in front of them. It was really disheartening and frustrating,” said Ian, who says he was there for about four hours that night.
Violent scuffles and arrests ensued, but Qureshi adds: “It was very peaceful in general. I think people were just upset at what was going on. I think people were upset that NYPD was there.”
A pair of protestors brung out some guitars and played for a while; Qureshi tells me that one cop who had been pictured laughing amidst the chaos was actually reacting to a protestor who kept pinching their own nipples. At one point a someone threw a used menstrual pad that stuck against the back of a cop car.
As the stand-off dragged on, City Councilwoman Sandy Nurse, who represents this part of Bushwick, showed up with Alex Franco, an attorney called by Okeke’s family. After several hours, the pair were denied a meeting with Okeke by hospital staff, a move that Franco would later tell the New York Times was both “highly irregular” and a violation of Okeke’s due process rights.
Around 2:30 a.m., after four hours, ICE began taking Okeke from the hospital via the ambulance bay on the side of the building, leading to the chaotic peak of the night, with protestors slinging more trash cans into the street to block their exit and smashing the rear window of an ICE vehicle. Police arrested eight people that night.
In a video shot by Dakota Santiago, and later shared by the viral Ukrainian-American reporter who goes by the name Oliya Scootercaster, ICE agents can be seen dragging Okeke through the ambulance bay as they fired pepper spray at protestors. NYPD officers appear alternately nervous and jovial as they block protestors from stopping the ICE agents. The agents stand for a while over a collapsed, shackled Okeke before exiting through the chaotic din.
Down the block, and away from the scrum, even more cops waited. Drones could be seen circling overhead; above them, a helicopter (“That felt like overkill,” Ian told me.)
Santiago’s footage then cuts to another key scene from the night: an overhead shot of the NYPD officers helping ICE agents change the tires of their vehicle on the Manhattan side of the Williamsburg bridge. It ends with more footage of the crowd outside the hospital, now stationary, chanting, “Who do you serve? Who do you protect?” (It’s worth noting that the NYPD lawyers recently argued in a court filing that it isn’t obligated to protect people from violent mobs, after a woman was assaulted by Chabad Zionists in Crown Heights last year.)
“I think if the NYPD had not been there, we would be reading headlines about how many New York City residents were killed by ICE… I 100% believe that would have been the case. Because when ICE did finally pull out their vehicle, people immediately started rioting… [ICE] were immediately reaching for their weapons… their eyes were bloodshot, wide open irises, almost as if they were on a drug-addled rampage… I think they wanted to kill someone,” Qureshi told me.
Okeke’s lawyers have since announced a lawsuit challenging his arrest and asking for his release from Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
A different kind of political fallout continued after a different video from that night spread showing a cop telling protestors that Mayor Mamdani, popular in the neighborhood, was “an embarrassment and total nonsense” and “not my mayor.” The officer, dispatched from the the 94th Precinct in Greenpoint, was identified as James G. Wilson, who was quickly “transferred to a less prominent role,” per one report (a 911 call center in the Bronx.)
That report was in the Times, which also cited an incident when Wilson and several other cops forced their way into an apartment in South Brooklyn in search of a lost badge which, in classic Times fashion, referred to the badge as a ‘shield.’ The story was cowritten by the paper’s Maria Farmer, who in her bio notes: “I usually work out of the “the shack”— a nickname that once referred to a set of windowless offices for the press … at 1 Police Plaza; however at the beginning of 2024 reporters were moved to a trailer outside the building.” (Cool gig!)
Other James G. Wilson stories that didn’t make the cut include several other complaints and lawsuits he was named in, per cop database 50-a.org, these include an incident where a public urinator had his arm broken, another where a falsely accused shoplifter was arrested, beaten and threatened, and one involving Wilson saying racial slurs.
Qureshi had hung around the scene until 5:30 a.m. after the situation calmed down, and told me he witnessed the surreal sight of Wilson attempting to jumpstart his car.
“[It was] really funny because the entire night he was acting like—just being a dickhead, or a bulldog. And then his goofy ass has to waddle over to his cop car like a penguin. He has a big belly, and he kept wobbling it around, almost like a cartoon character. [He] was literally holding up his gut at one point.”
Brian Jones Kraft is a writer who has been living in Bushwick for over a decade and a half. He has previously written extensively about the legacy of Andrew Cuomo, David Dinkins and that mural on the corner of Jefferson Avenue and Evergreen.
Color photos taken by Hamayel Qureshi.
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