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PROTECT Act Series · Part 1
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What the PROTECT Act Does. And What It Doesn't.
Police databases, ICE access, and why the school-to-deportation pipeline matters for Somerville.
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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.
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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.
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The Common Ground
What Both Versions Do and Don't Do on Police-ICE Communication
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Both versions of the PROTECT Act restrict what individual officers can do, which are key provisions from the Safe Communities Act included in this bill because so many of you have advocated for this bill for over a decade.
Officers cannot inquire about immigration status (although both versions have exceptions).
They cannot proactively share nonpublic personal information with ICE.
They cannot use state or local resources for civil immigration enforcement.
These are meaningful restrictions, but they are framed around individual officer conduct rather than data architecture and information flow. A key problem not addressed by the bills is that ICE has query access to databases that local police are instructed to use and populate.
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This is why the proposal to bring police back into Somerville schools is so dangerous.
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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:
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The Divergence
How Do the Two Versions Differ on Police-ICE Communication?
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The two versions take different approaches to how officers can contact ICE and what information can flow between local police and federal immigration authorities.
The House Version
The House version prohibits officers from initiating contact with ICE to share nonpublic personal information or provide advance notice of release dates. Officers cannot reach out to ICE on their own initiative. But it is unclear what happens when officers respond to ICE initiating the request. The House language doesn't have clear restrictions on responding to ICE requests.
The Senate Version
The Senate version creates a request-and-respond mechanism: if ICE sends a written request naming a specific individual, an officer can share that person's nonpublic personal information as long as the request was received within the last 30 days and an on-duty officer in charge authorizes it in writing. In other words, the Senate creates a structured, documented pathway for ICE to pull information from local police on request.
On 287(g) Agreements
The two versions also differ with respect to 287(g) agreements, which are formal contracts between ICE and state or local law enforcement agencies that deputize local officers to perform federal immigration enforcement functions. Massachusetts is the only blue state in the country with an active 287(g) agreement, through the Department of Correction (DOC). (I made a video explaining this that you can watch here.)
The House version allows law enforcement agencies to apply to the Secretary of Public Safety for time-limited 287(g) agreements, capped at 12 months, restricted to criminal purposes, with public notice, Attorney General legal analysis, quarterly reporting, and automatic sunset.
The Senate version drops the 287(g) application process entirely. Both effectively leave the DOC to maintain its existing 287(g) agreement, but the Senate requires federal reimbursement payments (Massachusetts receives payments to work with ICE) to be redirected to nonprofit legal services for immigrants.
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What Should the Final Bill Look Like
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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.
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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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Yours in service,
Erika Uyterhoeven
State Representative, 27th Middlesex
Candidate, State Senate, 2nd Middlesex District
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