Weekly Member Update - November 17, 2025

Reuters/Jim Vondruska

This extraordinary work of photojournalism depicts the arrest of Rev. Michael Woolf by members of the Illinois State Police during a protest outside the Broadview ICE facility in Chicago on Friday, November 14. Reverend Woolf, the Senior Minister at Lake Street Church of Evanston in Evanston, IL, has written extensively on the need for clergy to join in the protest and condemnation of the actions of ICE, and was one of more than a dozen faith leaders who were arrested at Broadview on Friday.

We begin this week’s installment with an emphasis on actions that you can take over the next several weeks as we move into the Holiday Season. First on the agenda is our SNAP Back campaign on behalf of the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York. Although the longest federal government shutdown has now ended (more on that below) and the Trump Administration is no longer using the cruel withholding of SNAP benefits for political leverage, the need to assist the Regional Food Bank (and other providers) continues unabated. Be reminded that the Republicans enacted the largest cut to SNAP benefits in American history in their “Big Beautiful Bill” this past summer, and millions of Americans are soon set to face draconian work eligibility requirements, while hundreds of thousands of lawful residents are having their SNAP eligibility taken away altogether. The widespread loss of federal food aid eligibility comes on top of more than $1 billion in Trump cuts to schools and local food banks, including subsidies to purchase food from local farms. We are therefore about to experience a perfect storm of food insecurity; with more of our neighbors losing federal benefits, the demand on Food Banks and other community resources increases just as the Trump Administration curtails the funding available to these very providers. Since Trump and his GOP cronies have chosen to increase the demand on food assistance while simultaneously decreasing the supply of those resources — all in order to give bigger tax breaks to the rich — if falls upon us to fill the gaps. So please consider donating to the Regional Food Bank through our portal; 100% of all donations go directly to the Food Bank and every dollar donated provides four meals to people in need throughout 23 counties of northeastern New York. For additional actions you can take on the food insecurity front, MoveOn has also established a SNAP Into Action resource page.

The flip side to our mutual aid efforts are the parallel boycott campaigns against corporations like T-Mobile, Avelo Airlines, Spotify and Home Depot that are complicit in the tyranny of the Trump Administration, as well as companies like Starbucks and Amazon that are outwardly hostile to labor organizing and workers’ rights. In addition, with the Holiday Season now upon us, we also recognize that these unprecedented times demand that we rethink holiday spending. We encourage everyone to consider channelling their own personal holiday spending into their local communities, not just by donating to mutual aid efforts like Snap Back, but also by supporting local businesses to the exclusion of multinational corporations. We’re not alone in this effort, as a host of national organizations have called for an economic blackout for the week of Thanksgiving through Black Friday and Cyber Monday, i.e., November 25 through December 2. Whether it is the People’s Sick Day movement, Blackout the System, or The Mass Blackout, we endorse all efforts to withdraw our labor and financial resources — if only for one week — from a system that that profits off of the pain of our communities, exploits our people and buys our politicians.

Speaking of Avelo Airlines, our ongoing campaign against the discount airline that tears families apart is expanding over the next month. First, this coming Thursday, on November 20, we’re doing our Flyer Blitz & Breakfast community outreach action beginning, fittingly enough, at the ‘76 Diner in Latham. Ten days later, on the morning of Sunday, November 30 — the biggest air travel day of the year — we’ll be looking to hold our most impactful protest yet outside of Albany International Airport to demand that Avelo be expelled from Albany County. While we are protesting outside Albany International, our friends across the Country — including our comrades-in-arms in Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina, the destination of Avelo flights to and from Albany — will be protesting against Avelo at more that a dozen other locations. And then, on the evening of Monday, December 8, we here at Indivisible Albany will be holding our Monthly Member Meeting at a new venue, that being the Chambers of the Albany County Legislature for the Legislature’s Public Forum and Legislative Meeting. Although eight members of the Albany County Legislature have finally publicly condemned Avelo and its blood-money contract with ICE, the vast majority of our local County officials, including County Executive Dan McCoy, have been conspicuously silent on the issue of Avelo’s complicity with ICE and the contractual relationship between Avelo and the Albany County Airport Authority. On December 8, we’ll be demanding that our local officials end their silence and work to expel Avelo from our community. We hope you can join us and, if you want to dress for success, we encourage you to check out the anti-Avelo merch in our online store!

We also continue to encourage you to prepare for the day when ICE and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents invade the Capital Region in force. Although the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops strongly condemned the actions of ICE in a powerful statement this week, as the image and text above makes clear, ICE and CBP continue to terrorize the people of Chicago. This week also saw federal agents begin to terrorize migrant communities — including church congregants — in Charlotte, North Carolina, likely in response to anti-ICE campaigns by Black Sheriffs throughout that state. Meanwhile, with Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani set to take the helm of New York City in a little over a month, The City is preparing for the inevitable invasion of the five Boroughs by ICE and CBP. Over the weekend, thanks to the efforts of Hands Off NYC, thousands of people came out to events all across New York City picking up and handing out materials like whistles and Know Your Rights cards to help defend their neighborhoods from ICE. As our neighbors to the south prepare to take on ICE and CBP, we’re doing the same thing. The ACLU has extensive Know Your Rights trainings available online, and the New York State Department of State has partnered with the New York Immigration Coalition to establish a host of online resources to help assist our migrant communities. Consistent with these efforts, a collection of SUNY Albany student groups will be leading a Know Your Rights training this Tuesday, November 18. We encourage everyone to avail themselves of any and all of these trainings and then take the next step by implementing the skills you learned at this summer’s One Million Rising trainings (or at a Share My Kitchen Table before that) and present Know Your Rights and anti-ICE trainings to your home neighborhoods. The more of neighbors that undergo these trainings, the more prepared that the Capital Region will be when we encounter ICE and CBP operations inside our communities.

Turning our attention to the national stage, we continue to see the fallout of Senate Democrats’ inexcusable capitulation on the government shutdown, and our Senior US Senator Chuck Schumer is feeling a ton of heat. Amid speculation that Schumer will not seek reelection in 2028, the national Indivisible umbrella organization is leading a telephone and social media campaign calling on Schumer to relinquish his leadership post atop the Senate Democratic caucus. MoveOn has also joined the clamor against Schumer, calling on him to step down as Senate Minority leader and circulating a people-powered petition to that effect. While the rage against Schumer and his centrist Democratic friends is very real, the end of the shutdown did have the effect of immediately shifting the focus back to Trump’s relationship with notorious child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The minute the government reopened, the Epstein Files exploded back to the front of the American consciousness, with the House Oversight Committee’s release of 20,000 emails and other documents obtained from Epstein’s estate. Mind you, this tranche of emails is NOT part of the actual Epstein Files in the possession of Pam Bondi and the Department of Justice, but the release of this correspondence was explosive nonetheless. There’s a suggestion that the kompromat that Vladimir Putin has on Donald Trump could relate to Bill Clinton and his, er, saxophone. We also learn that Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Larry Summers sought Epstein’s guidance on seducing his mentee at Harvard. There’s also the revelation that, in 2017, Epstein accurately described Trump as a “maniac” showing signs of “early dementia” who had “not one decent cell in his body.” And, lest anyone seriously had a doubt, Epstein also confirmed, in a January 2019 email, that “of course [Trump] knew about the girls.”  This coming Tuesday, the House will vote on whether the Epstein Files themselves should be released, and GOP Representatives like Elusive Elise Stefanik and Mike Lawler will need to show the American people whether they stand with Trump and his pedophile coverup or are instead on the side of Epstein’s survivors. To that end, Epstein’s survivors released a powerful video Sunday night.  We encourage you to watch it — it’s a difficult thing to witness — and feel free to pass it along to Lawler and Stefanik to make sure they see it before Tuesday’s vote.

Finally, in the wake of the capitulation by Senate Democrats, Indivisible announced the largest Democratic primary program in its history and is calling on local Indivisible groups like our own to nominate and elect Democratic candidates who have an actual backbone. Take note, this is a grassroots, bottom-up effort to remake the Democratic Party by challenging and pushing out Democrat electeds who are tentative, recalcitrant or simply unable to stand up against the authoritarian movement which has overtaken the GOP. Simply put, the objective is for local Indivisible groups to identify electeds in their own communities who are not rising to the moment and to identify and recruit alternative candidates to take them on. Frankly, we here at Indivisible Albany have long held the conviction that primary elections are a virtue, not a curse. In our view, steel sharpens steel, and a robust primary election fight not only creates better general election candidates who are more responsive to, and representative of, the constituencies that they serve, but primaries also serve to invigorate the electorate and drive turnout at the general election. This is particularly true in a predominantly deep blue community like the 518, where countless Democratic candidates regularly find themselves unopposed in the general election. So we’re 100% on board with this long-awaited national effort to energize the Democratic Party by building excitement and momentum for the 2026 midterms and by creating an energized roster of elected Democrats who can help establish a durable and lasting new American majority for 2027 and beyond. And 2026 is the perfect time to start, with a statewide race for Governor already under way, Congressional seats up for grabs from the North Country through the Hudson Valley, State Senate and Assembly seats on the ballot everywhere and even Town Supervisor races at issue again thanks to the Even-Year Election Law. So rest up during this Holiday season, Indivisibles, because we have plenty of work ahead of us!