Weekly Member Update - November 3, 2025

We begin this week’s installment with a celebration of a small victory. For more than six months, you have joined us in the streets outside of Albany International Airport in protest of the ongoing presence of Avelo Airlines at our community airport. Avelo turns a profit by tearing families apart; since this Spring, Avelo has been conducting deportation flights on behalf of ICE and the Trump Administration despite public knowledge that many of the individuals being deported have been deprived of the rights extended to them by the US Constitution. While ICE and other masked federal agents terrorize communities nationwide, Avelo aids and abets the campaign, trafficking thousands of our shackled neighbors overseas for profit, separating them from their families and often from the only home communities they have ever known.

While we have all been in streets demanding that Avelo be expelled from our hometown, we have also been working hard behind the scenes, rallying support to the cause from our elected officials. While a number of state and federal officials — most notably State Senator Patricia Fahy — have demonstrated solidarity and taken steps to help push out Avelo, our local County officials have been slow to the cause and have remained deafeningly silent about Avelo’s corporate complicity. That silence was finally broken this week when a group of eight Albany County Legislators — Susan Pedo from Albany’s Center Square and Pine Hills neighborhoods, Sam Fein representing Downtown, Arbor Hill and the South End, Lynne Lekakis from the Delaware Avenue, Helderberg, Whitehall, and New Scotland/Woodlawn neighborhoods in the City of Albany, Raymond Joyce from Albany’s West End, South Colonie’s Ellen Rosano, Dustin Reidy from Guilderland, Slingerlands’ William Reinhardt and Matthew Miller representing Selkirk, South Bethlehem, Glenmont and Delmar — issued the following joint correspondence:

To our knowledge, this is the first condemnation by any Albany County officials of “Avelo’s willing participation in and profiting from practices that are both unconstitutional and morally unconscionable,” and we applaud it. We hope that this public denunciation of Avelo by County officials inspires others — perhaps even County Executive and Airport aficionado Dan McCoy — to issue similar statements in opposition to the acts of ICE and Avelo. And, while the statement of these eight County Legislators merely encourages the Albany County Airport Authority to “use its influence to press Avelo” to cancel its contract with ICE — a highly unlikely outcome given that ICE keeps Avelo solvent — we hope that our elected officials and community leaders come to realize that the die has already been cast when it comes to Avelo. Avelo has deported thousands on ICE’s behalf, facilitating an increasingly brutal campaign of terror by masked agents in American communities. We therefore demand nothing short of Avelo’s complete expulsion from the Capital Region, and we will continue to work toward that goal. To that end, mark your calendars for Sunday, November 30, where we will mark one of the busiest airline travel days of the year with our biggest protest yet against Avelo at Albany International. Keep an eye on our events calendar for more details as the date approaches, and for more actions we have planned against Avelo in the weeks and months to come. Simply put, the show of solidarity from eight Albany County Legislators is a decent start, but it is no where near the end of our work against Avelo Airlines.

Avelo is not the only complicit corporation which has drawn our ire lately, and we were happy to join our friends from Guilderland Indivisible this past Saturday outside of the Home Depot in Crossgates Commons in one of several vigils and protests against Home Depot throughout the Capital Region. All across the Country, ICE agents are targeting immigrants in and around Home Depot stores, attacking workers, customers, and surrounding communities. These atrocities are happening on Home Depot’s watch, on its properties, and with its silence. The Home Depot company has not resisted or condemned these raids and, with its silence and inaction, Home Depot has become ICE’s passive partner. With every new raid, Home Depot is helping ICE meet its arrest quotas, fill private prisons, and spread fear in our communities. Please join us in our efforts to convince Home Depot to stand up against ICE and the Trump Administration by participating in the next rally or vigil in a community near you. In the meantime, spend your home improvement dollars elsewhere.

It is imperative that we continue to exert political and financial pressure on every corporation that abets the Trump regime’s unlawful mass deportation campaign, whether it be Avelo, Home Depot or Spotify. Why? Because the actions of ICE, Border Patrol and other masked federal agents become more prevalent, and more violent, with each passing day. We watch in horror as anonymous thugs kidnap our neighbors and assault the protestors who document the atrocities, including the illegal arrests of US citizens. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration and its subservient Department of Justice up the ante, issuing federal indictments against Congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh and others who have protested outside the Broadview detention facility the Chicago suburbs, all the while building out an industrialized deportation machine in Texas and planning for quick reaction deployments of National Guard troops to deal with mass protest actions. Remember too that the Republicans’ “Big Beautiful Bill” ballooned funding for ICE, with a lion’s share of that funding dedicated to “finding, arresting, detaining, and deporting immigrants already living in the U.S., most of whom have not committed a crime and many of whom have had lawful status.” And, if you have any lingering doubts where this is headed, you need only listen to the Orange King himself, who declared on 60 Minutes last night that ICE raids “haven’t gone far enough” despite evidence of the wanton and indiscriminate violence that federal agents are using on American streets.

So, as we said to last week, it is crucial that, in addition to working against complicit corporations, we also work to care for our home communities. That work is two-fold. First, as we all cope with the collapsing Trumpian economy that only rewards his billionaire friends, as well as the uncertainty surrounding the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that overwhelmingly benefits the working poor, including Trump’s own voters, we need to focus our volunteer efforts and financial assistance on our local communities in need. In addition, we need to prepare for expanded immigration enforcement actions in those very same home communities. To that end, the experience of Chicagoans has been illustrative, as the widespread federal enforcement actions in Chicagoland are largely taking pace in suburbs like Evanston, rather than in the City center. One could readily imagine the large-scale federal immigration enforcement now being introduced into New York City migrating up the Hudson into our update communities. So, we encourage all of you to educate yourself about your rights and to ready yourself to organize against widespread ICE activity here in our local neighborhoods.

These three themes — activism against corporate complicity, mutual aid in our home neighborhoods and training in preparation for expanded use of federal agents Upstate — will guide our work over these next several months and through the Holiday Season. We will touch upon all of these themes and more at our next Monthly Member Meeting a week from today, on November 10 beginning at 6 pm. We hope to see you there!