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- Rhode Island’s Black, Latino and Asian-American lawmakers are prioritizing legislation to protect undocumented immigrants.
- Another bill seeks to modify sentencing guidelines for misdemeanors to prevent the deportation of noncitizens for minor offenses.
- The legislative package also includes proposals to address education funding, racial discrimination, renter protections, and pharmacy benefit manager regulations.
PROVIDENCE – Rhode Island’s Black, Latino and Asian-American lawmakers, who are all Democrats, drew attention to their legislative priorities on Tuesday with an added emphasis this year on protecting Rhode Islanders, including those who are not in this country legally, from the “chaos raining down” from the Trump administration.
Many of the bills on the priority list of the Rhode Island Black, Latino, Indigenous, Asian-American and Pacific Islander (RIBLIA) Caucus are not technically new, only updated versions of bills that have been in the hopper for years.
One would allow convicted criminals to erase multiple felonies from their records. Another seeks to raise the $15 minimum wage to $20 an hour by 2030 and a third to levy a 3% surtax on Rhode Island’s highest earners, and more specifically: every dollar earned over $430,000.
Yet another reflects the perennial push to end so-called “payday lending” that allows sidewalk storefronts to provide short-term loans that, hypothetically at least, could cost a borrower up to 260% year in interest.
New bills focus on protecting Rhode Island’s undocumented immigrants
But the focus of several of the bills is Rhode Island’s undocumented population.
“While we recognize and understand that we are living through times of uncertainty and worry, as a caucus and as a community, we are ready to meet the moment,” said the co-chair of the caucus, state Rep. David Morales. “We are prepared to act with urgency … to make sure that Rhode Island is a place where everyone, no matter [their] racial background, their zip code or immigration status can thrive.”
“It is no secret that Rhode Island is facing a lot of challenges, especially for residents in communities of color,” said Sen. Tiara Mack, the caucus co-chair.
“Daily costs are rising at alarming rates” she said. “Our state’s essential systems are struggling and being stretched thin,” and in the midst of that, “there’s anxiety and fear that our residents are experiencing due to the chaos raining down in DC,” she said.
While the caucus is composed primarily of people of color, Mack emphasized that it was about “all Rhode Islanders” – funding services, providing high quality education, lowering the cost of health care, protecting renters and “correcting the persistent injustices in our legal system that have [targeted] Rhode Island communities of color for too long.”
One bill prohibits a landlord from asking a potential tenant’s immigration status.
Another requires the termination of any contract or agreement “to detain individuals for federal civil immigration violations” by July 1, 2026 and places a prohibition on the renewal of any such agreement between any arm of the state or municipality that may have one.
It would also bar the use of any public funds to “pay, reimburse, subsidize or defray in anyway any cost” related to the acquisition or “operation of a facility that detains or will detain individuals for federal civil immigration violations.”
No such agreements exists in Rhode Island right now, according to Juan-Pablo Ocampo, the coordinator of the Immigrant Coalition of Rhode Island. But he said the legislation emanates from the fear that the Trump administration will use access to – or denial of federal funds – to pressure communities to enter such agreements.
Another bill in the 15-bill package already passed this year by the Rhode Island Senate replaces the phrase “one year” in the maximum sentencing guidelines for a misdemeanor with 364 days to spare noncitizens – even those here legally – from potential deportation for relatively minor crimes.
If this sounds like a semantic exercise, Megan F. Jackson, legislative liaison for the Public Defender’s Office, explained the stakes this way at a recent legislative hearing.
“Because the crime of shoplifting carries the potential of a one-year prison sentence, a noncitizen convicted of taking a loaf of bread would be deportable under federal law, even if that individual is not sentenced to a year – or even a day – in prison.”
Other bills in the package seek to:
- Reconfigure, with a potential $20 million at stake, the way the state’s education formula counts “low-income students” so that the count includes students in families receiving Medicaid
- Prohibit discrimination on the basis of race by expanding the definition of race to include “traits historically associated with race, including, but not limited to, hair texture and protective hairstyles.”
- Specify in state law what does – and does not – amount to the “just-cause” eviction of a rental tenant.
- Place new controls on Pharmacy Benefit Managers – described by Sen. Linda Ujifusa as the middlemen for the middlemen – to avert unnecessary costs for patients and the Rhode Island Medicaid program.
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