Weekly Member Update - October 12, 2026
This coming Saturday is No Kings: Vote Early, and there are opportunities aplenty for you to hit the streets all over the Capital Region to motivate our friends and neighbors to get out the vote and help save our democracy. As the name suggests, the theme of this National Day of Action is to encourage early voting in massive numbers. Here in New York, early voting runs from Saturday, October 24 through Sunday, November 1; times and locations vary by County, so we’ve set up links on our website to tell you where to early vote, no matter which of the nine Capital Region Counties you are registered to vote in. Now is the time to make a plan for you yourself to vote early, and to encourage everyone you know to do the same. When you vote early, your voice is locked in and safe, no matter what chaos Trump and his minions might try and stir up on Election Day itself and, if something goes wrong with your ballot, early voting gives you the time and flexibility to fix it in order to make sure your voice is heard, loud and clear. So, for this coming Saturday, we’ve listed 14 different visibility events for you to choose from to help spread the word about early voting. You could even make a day of it; start out the morning at the Troy Farmers Market, spend lunchtime in Guilderland or Schenectady, and then wax nostalgic at a past No Kings location on Wolf Road or Westgate Plaza on your way home!
Another advantage to voting early is that it frees you up on Election Day itself to be a poll worker. To that end, Rensselaer County is still looking for poll inspectors and is offering a training on October 24 for folks who are registered to vote in that County.
Early voting has already started in other states and there are indications that the early voting push is bearing fruit, particularly in Latino communities that have been terrorized by Trump’s ICE goons for the past 22 months. Amid polls showing that Trump’s approval has absolutely cratered amid Hispanics, Latino early voting turnout in states like Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Virginia, New Jersey and Florida is exceeding where it was in the 2024 presidential cycle, and Latinos constitute a higher percentage of early voters in those states than in either of the last two election cycles.
ICE agent Brendan Cuni
It’s not hard to understand why Latinos — whose votes Trump so famously rode to victory in 2024 amid a perceived shift to the right in that community, primarily among Latino men — are abandoning Trump and Republicans in droves. It’s ICE, stupid.
What happened in the Marble Hill neighborhood on the border of Manhattan and The Bronx this past week is just another example of how ICE brutality has turned Latinos, and the American people writ large, against Trump and the Republican party. Oscar Belgal, an undocumented Dominican migrant with a 2023 larceny conviction that got him sentenced to a term of probation, was in a Honda SUV with his five-year-old son at 4pm when his car was surrounded by ICE agents. Almost immediately, and with the typical explanation that Belgal had “weaponized” his vehicle — just like Renee Good — the goons unloaded seven rounds into the vehicle. Although Belgal was shot in the neck, his son was miraculously not physically harmed, although the traumatized boy has apparently not spoken since the incident. New Yorkers, of course, took to the streets in protest, with Mayor Zohran Mamdani and other New York officials calling for an end of ICE operations in the City.
What struck us the most about this incident was the involvement of “ICE Supervisor” Brendan Cuni, pictured above, who was armed with a modified assault rifle and was posing as a construction worker in his yellow safety vest. First of all, it strikes us as utterly predictable that Belgal would try and flee from masked individuals in yellow vests with long guns who look, and behave, nothing like trained law enforcement. As presumptive Congresswoman-elect Darializa Avila Chevalier said over the weekend, “it is just completely asinine to think that anybody would interpret plainclothes people bashing on your car, brandishing weapons, as anything but a danger to the child that you know is sitting in the backseat of the car. What parent wouldn’t try to remove their child from that situation? What parent wouldn’t try and drive away from that?” But it also seems entirely predictable that Cuni and his crew would launch a fusillade of bullets on a crowded City street at 4:00 on a weekday afternoon. Cuni has a history of waving his gun around recklessly and acting violently at ICE incidents. He got in the face of our polka-dotted queen on Canal Street last October, and he was the supervising agent when his team tased and unlawfully arrested a Nigerian man in Bushwick in May. Federal judges have found Cuni to have lied in sworn court documents, and a man in The Bronx has accused Cuni of tasing him six times while he was handcuffed and calling him an ethnic slur. And Cuni doesn’t just terrorize New Yorkers; he was in Minnesota for “Operation Metro Surge” last winter and was accused of tossing a pregnant woman to the ground there, causing her to miscarry. We’d love to tell you that Cuni was some kind of outlier but, from all we have seen over the past two years, he actually seems pretty emblematic of the types of lawless thugs that comprise ICE.
ICE has compiled dossiers on Mainers who protested against the “Operation Catch of the Day” immigration enforcement action last January. Naturally, the database ICE is using was created by Palantir and, amid widespread concern that ICE agents will be deployed to the polls, ICE is also apparently using their Palantir database to investigate “voter fraud.” ProPublica has documented more than 500 incidents of ICE violently arresting American citizens, 12 of whom have actually been deported. ICE is maintaining a “spy center” in Williston, Vermont, it’s expanding its Batavia detention facility outside Buffalo so that it can imprison more women, and ICE appears to running an off-the-books, black-site detention center out of a warehouse in northern New Jersey. Stephen Miller apparently explicitly directed that the Jersey detention center be inhumane, which totally tracks given that Miller is leading a whole-of-government effort to deport as many undocumented children as possible. In California, ICE is ramping up its operations in advance of the midterms, instructing its officers to “go after anybody” in an operation that has been condemned for its brutality by the Farm Workers Union. Amnesty International has concluded that ICE and the Trump Administration have engaged in widespread human rights violations, including unlawful surveillance, harassment, intimidation, degrading treatment and unjustified use of force. And then there are the so-called third-country removals, the illegal and barbaric human rights violation of deporting people, using brutal airline journeys, to foreign countries that they have no connection to. All of it is a mass deportation project carried out with the tacit approval of the United States Supreme Court in furtherance of Miller’s white-nationalist, remigration initiative. As NYC Public Advocate Jumaane Williams recently put it, “If this was happening in another country right now, we’d probably be trying to figure out how to intervene.”
Trump and Miller may have brought us this horror, but Republicans everywhere — from Susan Collins, to Greg Abbott, to Bruce Blakeman, to the rest — have enabled it every step of the way. So yes, we need to vote early as if our very souls depended upon it. We don’t need a blue wave so much as we need a red repudiation. We need a wholesale rejection of the cruelty and lawlessness and corruption that the Republican Party has rendered upon us, and that rejection needs to be in numbers large enough to punish the MAGA Republican Party for a generation.
The Week in Flock
In Guilderland, where the Town Board has been pretty tight-lipped about Flock in the Town, Police Chief Daniel McNally believes that Flock cameras are a useful tool, and his Department has “policies” to make sure that civil liberties are not violated. No one denies the cameras’ “usefulness,” Chief McNally — warrantless searches are always useful to the police — but the cameras’ mere existence violates all of our civil liberties.
The Times Union reports that, in Troy, neither the activists who oppose Flocks nor the police who love them are happy with the compromise legislation passed by the City Council.
The Fulcrum has it right; dismantling the surveillance state entirely should be the true objective.
In his recent HVCC candidate forum with opponent Joe Adamo, Assembly Member John McDonald indicated that joint Assembly Committee hearings on ALPRs will be held in November. McDonald’s Republican colleague, Patrick Chludzinski, had called for the hearings after incidents of police abuse of the technology were discovered in Western New York.
As we previously reported, Dutchess County has decisively chosen to Get the Flock Out. Now, because they don’t trust Flock in the interim, Dutchess County legislators are going to have the cameras covered until they’re removed.
At Elgin Community College in Chicagoland, administrators have also had the cameras covered when Flock refused to remove them.
Meanwhile, the vultures are definitely circling the wounded Flock, which is reportedly shedding nearly a fifth of its workforce as the company becomes a national pariah.
Odds & Ends
Russia, Russia, Russia. Russian-American businessman Konstantin Sokolov is one of the private donors to Trump’s precious ballroom project. We’re sure its merely a coincidence that a firm associated with Sokolov recently got Treasury Department permission to purchase an Armenian copper mine from a Russian state-owned bank that has been subject to widespread sanctions since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In other Ukraine news, Trump henchmen Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are making sure that they get paid as part of any deal to end the Ukraine War. Meanwhile, Trump has illegally given our tax money to Russia for a few days’ worth of diesel oil and scolds Ukraine for not surrendering as Russia continues to murder its citzens. Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine is traitorous, in our view, and longtime Putin critic Bill Browder agrees.
As Pete Hegseth announces plans to livestream the firing-squad execution of the 2009 Fort Hood shooter, he should probably keep in mind that execution is often the penalty for war crimes like perfidy, the cowardly practice of disguising military aircraft as nonmilitary planes, which the American military apparently engaged in last September as part of its Caribbean murder campaign.
The New York Federal Reserve attributes the entirety of inflation on everyday consumer items to be attributable to Trump’s disastrous tariff policies. Meanwhile, the consequences of the Republicans’ Big Beautiful SNAP cuts are starting to be felt in rural Trump Country.
In Virginia, the Country’s data center capital, a data center in Sterling recently ran its diesel backup generators for more than 24 hours straight, driving residents from their homes. Local officials have no recourse, a situation common to 189 of Virginia’s 197 permitted data centers.
Speaking of data centers, get a load of this picture of the American construction industry in the age of Trump.
We close with this image of the Gen X Goddess who let Trump and MAGA have it in Syracuse this past Friday. We think we’ve found the hottest Halloween costume for 2026; in the words of Les Claypool, “To defy the laws of tradition is a crusade only of the brave.”