I hope this message finds you well and you were able to stay cool this week. Yesterday, I spent the day at the State House with 159 of my colleagues trying to work despite a broken AC system. Fortunately the 228 year old building has a few generations of insulation in the walls...

This week, I want to share with you an issue that is deeply important to me as a daughter of immigrants, which is ensuring that Massachusetts is doing everything it can to protect our immigrant community from ICE. This issue is what drove me to work in state advocacy and run to be your State Representative in the first place. During Trump's first term, the Massachusetts legislature didn't pass a single law to protect immigrants. Thanks to years of building power and working closely with our immigrant communities, I am thrilled that we are not repeating this deeply harmful status quo, and are taking steps in the right direction by passing the PROTECT Act.

The House passed its version of the PROTECT Act (H.5316) on March 25 by a vote of 134–21, and the Senate passed a different version (S.3072) on May 7 by a vote of 37–3. The PROTECT Act is now in conference committee of six legislators who will reconcile the two bills into a single version to send to the Governor to sign into law. The choices they make will determine the scope of immigrant protections in Massachusetts for years to come.

I want to walk you through what both versions do, where they diverge, and what neither version does.

This is Part 1 of a series. Today I am focusing on the gap that is relevant to our communities right now based on recent proposals: police databases, ICE access, and the school-to-deportation pipeline.

This is why the proposal to bring police back into Somerville schools is so dangerous.

Any officer is required to make observations, file incident reports, and enter information into databases as part of their standard law enforcement duties. There is nothing in current Massachusetts law, and nothing in either version of the PROTECT Act, that would prevent ICE from accessing this information through shared database infrastructure. Both the bill language and the previous deliberations of the School Committee focus too heavily on individual officer conduct and not enough on the system of policing and its inextricable links to surveillance and the deportation pipeline.

On Monday, I testified before the Somerville School Committee against a recent proposal to reinstate a police officer (or SRO) at the Somerville High School. I shared the story of Orlando, a student at East Boston High School who was wrongfully labeled as a gang member, when a school police officer filed an incident report on a lunchtime argument Orlando was involved in. As a result, Orlando was entered into a gang database called BRIC (the Boston Regional Intelligence Center), and despite having no criminal record, was arrested by ICE, detained for over a year, struggled with depression while incarcerated, before being deported to El Salvador.

Orlando's case is not an anomaly, it is the result of a well-documented system that has upended many students' lives. The BRIC gang database is comprised of 97.7% people of color and is accessible to ICE through the Department of Homeland Security. Neither version of the PROTECT Act prohibits that access.

If you also care about keeping police out of Somerville schools, something our community has been organizing around for many years, please sign up to get involved in this issue here:

The conference committee will build the final bill from what already exists in the two versions. The strongest version would combine the House's hard prohibition on officers initiating contact with ICE and the Senate's documented process when ICE requests and retrieves information.

I believe there is no place for existing 287(g) agreements, nor any pathway to create new ones.

It's important to remember that women are at greater risk of ICE detention and deportation simply because of how our state handles justice-involved women and men differently. For example, women who are pre-trial (i.e. have never been convicted of a crime) and women convicted of lower level offenses are placed in DOC custody simply due to a lack of women's facilities across MA counties.

Furthermore, due to economic and racial disparities present in the criminal legal system (such as an inability to afford an attorney), the justice system is already stacked against the most marginalized communities and it gets it wrong far too often. As an example, 7.2% of first-degree murder convictions were successfully overturned, with a cumulative 911 years served with a wrongful conviction (over 14 years). And now, an already abhorrent reality is being layered with the threat and nearly irreversible consequence of deportation.

Even the strongest version of this bill will not address the database access gap. As such, our fight continues both in the State House and in City Hall.

In Part 2, I will cover where the two versions diverge on protected locations: the Senate's new protections for schools, child care centers, health care facilities, and places of worship, and the House provisions the Senate dropped (including detention facility protections and bail reform). In Part 3, I will cover the new state civil rights cause of action, the military forces provision, election protections, and the T/U visa certification reforms.

You can read the full text of both versions (H.5316 and S.3072) on malegislature.gov and Yawu Miller wrote an excellent piece summarizing the PROTECT Act on Flipside News. Please contact your legislators and ask them to push for the strongest possible protections in the final bill. Our immigrant neighbors are counting on us to get this right.

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Paid for by Committee to Elect Erika Uyterhoeven · Somerville, MA
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