Standing Up to ICE & Protecting Our Neighbors

Erika is the daughter of a Japanese immigrant, and her community carries the memory and generational trauma of what happens when the government turns against the people. Every person in Massachusetts deserves to live, work, go to school, and access care without fear of incarceration or deportation. Erika initiated the push to get ICE out of Massachusetts, advocating for immigrant protections for years, and she was proud to vote for the PROTECT Act that was signed into law this summer. But the work is unfinished: ICE still has access to local police databases, and Massachusetts remains the only fully Democratic state with an active 287(g) agreement, which has funneled more than 2,000 people to deportation. We must get ICE out of Massachusetts.

Fear Has No Place in the Life of Any Person

In our Commonwealth, diversity is our greatest strength, and yet too many of our immigrant neighbors face an impossible choice: seek the protections that guard everyone's rights and risk separation from their families, or stay silent and stay vulnerable. No one should suffer wage theft, unsafe working conditions, wrongful eviction, or go without healthcare because reporting the abuse could mean deportation, and no child should be afraid to go to school. Fundamental rights are inherited at birth, and they do not depend on documentation status.

For Erika, this is not abstract. Growing up as the daughter of a single mother from Japan, she witnessed every day the contributions immigrants make to our communities, and she lived the challenges that newly arrived families are up against, treated as outsiders in their own community. And her family's history carries a warning that this country has turned its government against immigrants before, building the registries, the databases, and the camps, and calling it security. That is why Erika treats every fight over a police database, a data broker contract, and a detention agreement as what it is: the infrastructure of the next injustice, being assembled in plain sight.

What We Have Already Won

Massachusetts has built real protections, and Erika has fought for them at every step:

• State and local police cannot hold someone for ICE without a judicial warrant. The Supreme Judicial Court established this in 2017, and legislators like Erika have beaten back every attempt to weaken it since. It is the single biggest reason Massachusetts is attacked as a "sanctuary state," and it is worth defending every single day.
• Driver's licenses for all, regardless of immigration status. The Legislature passed the law, overrode a veto, and when opponents forced a repeal vote onto the ballot, Erika organized canvasses across the district to defend it, and the voters of Massachusetts upheld it. Mobility is a human right, and a routine traffic stop should never become a deportation.
• In-state tuition for every Massachusetts high school graduate, regardless of status, so the students we educate can afford the public colleges their families help fund.
• The state's first Immigrant Legal Defense Fund, because an immigrant with a lawyer is dramatically more likely to win their case than one without.
• The PROTECT Act, signed into law this summer, banning new 287(g) agreements that would deputize local police as ICE agents, at the very moment those agreements are exploding across the country.
• Privacy protections against ICE moving forward, because ICE has bought its way around the Fourth Amendment by purchasing location data from commercial data brokers without a warrant, and Massachusetts can shut that door.

And the story of how the recent wins happened matters as much as the wins themselves. In December, legislative leaders said publicly that there was little the state could do about federal immigration enforcement. Erika refused to accept that, laying out concretely what the State House could do, and with the political pressure that transparency and organizing make possible, two bills to protect immigrants moved forward within months.

The Honest Truth About What a State Can Do

Erika will always tell you the truth about power. We live under a federal constitution, and there is no law Massachusetts can pass that simply makes ICE disappear: immigration enforcement is a federal function, and Congress holds the power to defund or abolish ICE. But that honesty should embolden us, not excuse us, because everything Massachusetts actually controls is still on the table. We control our police departments and what they cooperate with. We control our prisons and who they hand over. We control our courthouses, our schools, our databases, and our data. We control our budget. Every one of those is a door between our neighbors and the deportation machine, and Erika will fight to close every single one.

The Unfinished Agenda

In the Senate, Erika will keep organizing with the immigrant justice coalition she has worked alongside for years, including the advocates, legal experts, and community defense networks doing this work on the front lines. And she will fight to:

• End all cooperation between Massachusetts and ICE, formal and informal. Pass a statewide non-cooperation law: no questioning about immigration status by police or court officials, no ICE interviews of people in custody without written informed consent, and no tip-offs to ICE about someone's release, because informal phone calls are deporting our neighbors just as surely as formal agreements.
• Terminate the Department of Correction's 287(g) agreement. Massachusetts remains the only fully Democratic state with an active agreement handing people from our prisons to ICE, and the PROTECT Act's carve-out preserving it must be closed.
• Cut off the data pipeline. End ICE's access to local police databases, stop state agencies from sharing residents' information with immigration enforcement, and ban data brokers from selling location data to ICE, because a deportation that starts with a database query is still a deportation.
• Keep ICE out of our courthouses, schools, and hospitals. No one should be afraid to testify, drop off their kids, or see a doctor, and Massachusetts can restrict how its own institutions and spaces are used for immigration enforcement.
• Require every law enforcement agent in Massachusetts to identify themselves. Masked, unidentified agents in unmarked cars are terrorizing communities, and Erika will carry forward the legislation Senator Jehlen championed to require clear identification, because accountability begins with a name and a face.
• Make ICE agents answerable in our courts. Everyone in Massachusetts holds constitutional rights regardless of status, and Erika will fight to strengthen the state's civil rights laws so that agents who brutalize our neighbors can be held liable.
• Guarantee legal representation and end ICE detention in Massachusetts. Make the Immigrant Legal Defense Fund permanent and fund it at the scale of the crisis, so every immigrant facing detention or deportation has a lawyer, and get ICE detention out of our Commonwealth for good.