The Councilman Who Didn't Want Legal Advice on Stopping ICE
Paul Ruggiero in the Town of Newburgh provides a helpful demonstration of moral cowardice.
Above, you can watch video from this week’s Newburgh Town Board meeting. At 26:26, the Town Board voted almost unanimously to hire an attorney to advise them on how to deal with the ICE facility at 800 Corporate Boulevard.
Almost everyone voted yes to hire The West Law Firm out of Albany. The founding partner, Thomas S. West, specializes in environmental law and administrative law. (We’ve reached out to Mr. West for comment about his hiring and will update this story if we hear back.)
Can you guess who didn’t vote to hire a law firm to assist the Town?
It’s our pal, Councilmember Paul Ruggiero.
Something that was not lost on Newburgh residents in attendance, who called him out for his factually inaccurate Facebook post, looking at his phone while the public spoke in support of further action by the Town Board against DHS,and his pandering to fascists and weirdos.
Mr. Ruggiero’s sketchy election “victory” is something we’re still investigating.
Mr. Ruggiero also did not respond to our questions concerning his Facebook post. The Town Board also has not yet commented on Mr. Ruggiero factually spreading lies within the community.
Call us old fashioned, but if a Councilmember is caught spreading MAGA disinformation? That should be something for an ethics committee to look into.
That said, I did find something you should know about Mr. Ruggiero.
He has a loose connection to the white collar crime spree occurring in South Blooming Grove. One of the alleged participants just gave Mr. Ruggiero a campaign contribution.
Who?
The man with the no-show job as the Code Enforcement Officer and Village Engineer, Al Fusco Jr.
Fusco first donated in 2021 and then again in May 2026. They’re not the biggest donations, to be clear, but that’s not the thing to worry about.
The thing to worry about, if you’re a Town of Newburgh resident, is that if you’re at all familiar with the South Blooming Grove story, you know that everyone involved or associated with it is a potential criminal.
So, yeah, it’s a $100 donation. But it’s a $100 donation from a man charging hundreds of thousands of dollars to a Village in exchange for a no show gig.
If law enforcement isn’t sniffing around Mr. Fusco right now, they will be.
Like the one that JUST happened. We’ll have more coverage on this one soon.
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Now, as a follow-up to our previous post, I can share that Home Rule does not prevent the Attorney General from enforcing any state laws that may be violated by DHS or ICE while they attempt to set up shop in Newburgh.
So between the AG’s office and the West Law Firm, Newburgh residents can be at least optimistic that the Town is going to put up a fight here.
But.
As pointed out by residents at this meeting, it’s now been five weeks since the news broke—partially by us—that the concentration camp may be coming to Newburgh.
In that time, the Town has not passed even a temporary resolution prohibiting the conversion of warehouse space to house people. The Town said during this meeting that this is something they will discuss with the West Law Firm.
A temporary, or better still, permanent prohibition on such a conversion is something Town residents in Newburgh and residents across Orange County should be asking for.
If you have a community with big empty warehouses, such a resolution should be number two on your activism shopping list.
Number one should be ensuring as many people as possible in your community come out to vote in November.
This way, no matter what the dictator tries, it won’t matter, because the volume of votes will be insurmountable for him to claim fraud or that it was otherwise stolen.
America has to come out in undeniable numbers in November. If you’re not ready to do this, you’re not keeping your eye on the prize.
I got one other thing for you…
To nobody’s surprise, the deadline for a response to our GSA FOIA concerning 800 Corporate Boulevard (FOIA 2026-FOI-01938) has come and gone. This is the FOIA we attempted to use AI to generate.
Coming up, I’ll try to generate a FOIA response with the same process, show you how I did it, and then send it in to GSA.
The public has a right to know what’s planned for 800 Corporate Boulevard, and we’re going to do what we can to make sure you know as soon as we do.