Weekly Member Update - July 7, 2025
We’re not going to sugarcoat it, last week was a rough one. Despite all the pleading phone calls and angry emails that we all sent to Mike Lawler, Elise Stefanik and their friends in Congress, the Republican majority in the House and Senate ignored the needs and desires of the American people and did what Republicans have done with regularity over the past 50 years, preserving lower taxes for the rich, adding exponentially the federal budget deficit and slashing services for the working class that they baselessly label as “waste, fraud and abuse.” But even though the MAGA Murder Budget follows a familiar Republican playbook, this particular version takes their cruelty to another level, endangering the healthcare of nearly 12 million Americans, cutting SNAP eligibility for foster children and veterans and threatening the closure of hundreds of rural hospitals. To top it off, we got to watch gleeful Republicans celebrate their callous cruelty at a tone-deaf White House ceremony that King Trump, of course, made all about himself.
But, from our perspective, the most terrifying aspect of the Big Beautiful Betrayal is the way it promises to turn ICE into a massive domestic secret police force. We’ve watched what ICE has done in Los Angeles; with the unconstitutional assistance of the United States military, ICE has undertaken a terror campaign against Angelinos, abducting hundreds of law-abiding farm laborers, hospitality staff and construction workers, and driving countless more underground, imperiling local businesses and raising prices for all of us as produce rots in Californian fields. With this bill’s passage, ICE now has the resources to replicate what it is doing in Los Angeles all across the Country. Meanwhile, Ron DeSantis has constructed a concentration camp with a cutesy name for Trump to use in the Florida Everglades, and ICE now has the funding to construct an entire network of these facilities, raising the spectre of forced labor facilities where Trump can house all those he labels as “illegal.” As Trump muses about imprisoning or denaturalizing his political opponents like Zohran Mamdani, and mindful of what we have already seen with Senator Alex Padilla and Congresswoman LaMonica McIver, its not hard to envision that ICE will eventually use its vast resources against Trump’s enemies with the same level of inhumanity and illegality that it is using against our undocumented neighbors.
Make no mistake, Trump is a would-be dictator, and the time to recognize what is happening to our Nation and to prepare for what is to come is at hand. This past Friday night on MSNBC, Indivisible Co-founder Ezra Levin said the truth, “The [midterm] election is 16 months away. Our response to the worst piece of legislation in modern American history cannot be ‘go vote in 16 months.’” Instead, we need to come together to support our communities immediately and prepare for the struggle directly in front of us. To that end, we here at Indivisible Albany plan to offer a host of training opportunities to help give you the skills, and the mindset, you will need to help resist the right-wing authoritarianism that Trump’s Big Beautiful Betrayal has now supercharged. Tonight, for example, you can join us for the latest installment of Anti-Fascism Training at Unity Church in the City of Albany. Then, starting on July 16, and continuing throughout the summer, you can join multiple sessions of Indivisible’s One Million Rising strategic noncooperation trainings.
We’ll be discussing these training opportunities and other actions to come at our July Monthly Member Meeting at the Guilderland Public Library at 6:00 on July 14. And finally, our July meeting is only a few days before our next big thing, the Good Trouble Lives On event in the City of Albany.
Across the country, authoritarian forces are getting bolder and more dangerous. Trump and his allies are not hiding their agenda: mass deportations, rollbacks of civil rights, a weaponized Department of Justice, and full-scale attacks on our democracy. We don’t have to wait until it’s too late; We can stop this. But it’ll take all of us—not just on single days of mass action, but through sustained organizing in our communities. That is the objective of Indivisible Albany, and we’re proud to have you by our side as we help build a community to fight for the soul of our nation.