When ICE agents pulled a handcuffed man out of the emergency room at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in Bushwick, the silence that drew the most attention afterward came from the lawmaker who represents that hospital and chairs the state committee on incarceration. That silence is now a campaign.
The incident was ugly. On May 2, ICE agents dragged Chidozie Wilson Okeke, an undocumented Nigerian immigrant, from the Wyckoff Heights ER onto the pavement, with one agent reportedly drawing a weapon, setting off protests in the neighborhood. Okeke’s lawyers filed a federal petition challenging the arrest as unlawful and brutal.
It happened in Assembly District 54, which covers parts of Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, Cypress Hills and East New York and is represented by Erik Dilan, who has chaired the Assembly Committee on Correction since 2023, the exact state body that oversees how people are held in custody. A primary challenger, Christian Celeste Tate, built a campaign op-ed around the obvious question: where was he.
That is the grounded charge, and it is sharper than a generic no-show complaint because of the office Dilan holds. A man being hauled out of a hospital in his district, by agents acting in his policy lane, is exactly the moment a state corrections chair would be expected to speak to. Tate’s op-ed presses that gap and ties Dilan’s quiet to the developer money in his campaign account, framing the silence as a choice rather than an oversight.
Dilan is not without a record, and a challenger’s op-ed is a challenger’s argument; the incumbent has his own account of his work in Albany. But the politics of the moment are clear: in a district shaken by an ICE raid on a hospital, the most direct attack on the sitting assembly member is not what he did, it is what he did not say.
Voters settle it in the June 23 Democratic primary. Dilan’s Assembly record and committee role are public on the state’s site, and the candidate’s own words, his and Tate’s, on the Wyckoff Heights arrest are the thing to weigh, because in this race the response to that morning is the campaign.
Featured image: Rhododendrites / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
