Fighting for what matters

Until recently, lawmakers on Beacon Hill took most of their votes behind closed doors, and Massachusetts is the only state in the country where the governor, legislature, and judiciary all exempt themselves from public records law. They prioritize corporate interests over our communities, and with no transparency, we don't have a voice or the ability to hold legislators accountable. It is no coincidence that ours is also one of the least productive legislatures in the country: when power is concentrated behind closed doors, the bills our communities need die quietly in committee. Erika co-founded Act on Mass to change this. Act on Mass organized ballot campaigns across the state, and won: as of last year, every committee vote is now posted publicly online. That transparency is already delivering results: when the public could see what was in the energy bill, the poison pills that would have raised your bills were stripped out, and with that same accountability the Legislature finally moved legislation to protect our immigrant neighbors.

• Ensure everyone has enough time to review and meaningfully advocate for a bill before filing amendments or taking a vote. Almost always, legislators have only a few hours to review a bill before filing amendments, even if it is hundreds of pages long.
• Pass public records law that applies to all three branches of government.
• Apply open meeting law to the Legislature, which is particularly important for conference committees where six lawmakers determine the near-final version of a bill before sending to the Governor to sign.
• Defend the voter-approved audit of the Legislature, which passed with 72 percent support.

More than half of your monthly bill isn't the electricity or gas you use to heat or cool your home, it goes to a black box of profit (or "delivery charges"). Your energy bills are high because utility giants like Eversource and National Grid have access to lawmakers behind closed doors. Erika was one of just a few legislators who fought to ensure we all know where our money is going when utilities try to raise our bills, and she was one of the few Democrats who voted against handing utilities a 30-year monopoly. For 12 years, polluters snuck $6.2 billion of gas infrastructure onto your bill because legislators were silent. Climate action and affordability are the same fight: the clean energy transition is how we lower bills for good.

• Transition Massachusetts to 100 percent renewable energy with good union jobs, building offshore wind, solar, and a modern grid with prevailing wage, project labor agreements, and apprenticeship pipelines.
• Make every home affordable to heat and cool by expanding energy efficiency programs with no-cost upgrades for renters, working families, and environmental justice communities, so the households paying the most into these programs finally get their fair share back.
• Stop building new gas infrastructure that locks ratepayers into decades of costs for pipelines we are working to retire.
• Make corporations pay their own way: no more utility lobbying and advertising charged to your bill, and no more data centers getting tax breaks while shifting their massive energy costs onto residents.

For decades, Beacon Hill has treated housing as a commodity for investors instead of a necessity for working people, funneling billions through a model that guarantees private returns while rents skyrocket and families are pushed out of the communities they built. Erika fought to change that and won, passing the law ending forced broker fees and doubling local affordable housing funding. Now we must go bigger: building 100,000 permanently affordable homes through public financing, homes that never expire and never convert to market rate, passing real tenant protections so renters can stay in their homes, and ending chronic homelessness with the proven Housing First approach, which provides a home first so people can rebuild their lives from a stable foundation.

• Build homes people can actually afford through deep investments in public and social housing, and give tenants the first opportunity to purchase their building when the landlord sells.
• Guarantee every tenant facing eviction a lawyer, and ban the price-fixing software that corporate landlords use to inflate rents across entire neighborhoods.
• Stabilize rents by lifting the statewide ban on rent control, so cities and towns can protect tenants from out-of-control increases and keep families in their homes.

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.

• End cooperation between Massachusetts and ICE, including cutting off ICE's access to state and local police databases and ending the school-to-deportation pipeline.
• Get ICE out of our prisons by ending the agreement that lets the state hand people over for deportation, and end ICE detention in Massachusetts for good.
• Guarantee legal representation for every immigrant facing deportation, because no one should stand alone in court against the federal government.

Healthcare is a human right, and the fight for Medicare for All is what brought Erika into politics on the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016. As a former EMT, she understands what our broken profit-driven system does to the workers who hold it together and to the patients who fall through its cracks. Massachusetts spends over $128 billion a year on healthcare, and more than 40 percent of that goes to insurance company administrative waste, monopolistic drug pricing, and billing bureaucracy that makes no one healthier. Medicare for All would cut our healthcare costs by 23 percent in its first year alone. The collapse of Steward Health Care showed us exactly what happens when private equity runs our hospitals. We must build a system that puts patients before profit.

• Guarantee healthcare to every single resident by passing Medicare for All in Massachusetts, with no copays, no deductibles, and no one left uninsured.
• Kick private equity out of our hospitals and build a system that puts patients before profit.
• Protect MassHealth and our community health centers from federal cuts, so no one in Massachusetts loses care because of what happens in Washington.

Public education is the promise we make to every child, and right now we are breaking it at both ends: families are paying more for child care than for rent, and educators are leaving the profession because they cannot afford to live in the communities they serve. Erika fought for $1.5 billion in new funding for our public schools, and she filed the bill to guarantee a living wage for every educator, including a $55,000 minimum salary for the paraprofessionals and support staff who keep our schools running. She will keep fighting until every school is fully funded, because a child's education must never depend on their zip code. From pre-K through public college, education is a public good.

• Make early education and child care affordable for every family, and pay early educators a wage that reflects the importance of their work.
• Guarantee a living wage for every educator, from teachers to paraprofessionals to the cafeteria workers and custodians who keep our schools running, and fully fund our public schools so no child's education depends on their zip code.
• Make public higher education debt-free, so every student in Massachusetts can earn a degree without a lifetime of loans.

Our district's future runs on public transit. Transportation is the largest source of climate pollution in Massachusetts, and the people who rely most on the T are the people who can least afford fare hikes and service cuts. Decades of disinvestment gave us slow zones, shuttle buses, and unreliable service, and the answer is public investment at the scale of the problem. Fare-free transit is climate policy and it is economic policy: every dollar not spent at the fare gate is a dollar back in a working family's pocket. We all deserve a fast, free, and reliable T.

• Make the T fare-free, starting with buses, so public transit is truly public and every ride puts money back in riders' pockets.
• Deliver fast, frequent, and reliable service by taxing offshore corporate profits and millionaires fairly to fund the T at the scale of the need, so you can count on the train or bus showing up on time.
• Electrify our buses and trains and build safe streets for walking and biking in every community in the district.

Artificial intelligence is already deciding who gets a job interview, a loan, an apartment, and healthcare, and the corporations building it want to write their own rules. When the Healey administration signed an unprecedented multimillion-dollar contract to put ChatGPT in front of tens of thousands of state employees, Erika was the only legislator to demand accountability: the contract was scored on seven categories, and not one of them was safety, and not one of them was bias, and not one of them was accuracy, and nothing in it kept our private data from being shared with companies that work with ICE. And the AI boom is now arriving in our neighborhoods as data centers, massive facilities that consume enormous amounts of energy and water, built with tax breaks snuck into bills while communities that have waited decades for clean air are asked to wait again. Erika filed legislation to protect working class communities and communities of color from the environmental impact of data center expansion, and she filed the Digital Commonwealth Act to guarantee your rights when AI makes decisions about your life, because Massachusetts must prove that innovation and accountability go hand in hand.

• Guarantee your right to know when AI is making decisions about your job, your loan, your housing, or your healthcare, and require independent safety testing before the government deploys any AI system.
• Stop data brokers from selling your location and personal data to anyone with a checkbook, including ICE.
• Defend Massachusetts's power to hold Big Tech accountable, as the largest corporations in history lobby Washington to strip states of the authority to regulate AI.

Massachusetts passed the Shield Law and won in court, but legal protection without funding is merely a values statement. Under federal attack, providers across our state stopped offering gender-affirming care to young people, and families were left scrambling. Erika organized with families, providers, and advocates, and helped win the first-ever state funding for gender-affirming care: $1 million in the budget, and another $3.5 million this spring. And it is still not enough, because many youth still don't have the healthcare they need. Queer and trans liberation means our neighbors can access care, live openly, and grow up safe from surveillance and discrimination.

• Guarantee funded access to gender-affirming care for every trans person in Massachusetts, and for every trans young person, no matter what Washington does.
• Make Massachusetts a true refuge by strengthening legal protections for patients, families, and providers against out-of-state prosecution and federal attacks.
• Stop surveillance policies, including mandatory age verification, that strip queer and trans youth of their privacy and put them in danger.

Reproductive justice means every person has the right to decide whether and when to have children, and the resources to raise them in safety and dignity. In the House, Erika helped push the ROE Act, voted to strengthen the Shield Law, and championed the full spectrum of reproductive care: doula coverage through MassHealth, birth centers, IUD pain management, and reproductive healthcare for incarcerated people. And she will not accept that Black women in Massachusetts still face far higher rates of maternal mortality: that is a policy failure and requires bold action to eliminate racial health disparities. As Washington defunds family planning, Massachusetts must guarantee that no patient loses care because of what happens in Congress.

• Remove every barrier to abortion care, including for young people, so that access never depends on your age, your income, your immigration status, or your zip code.
• Fund the full spectrum of reproductive care, from doulas and midwives to birth centers, and end the racial disparities in maternal mortality that are taking Black mothers' lives.
• Guarantee state funding for Planned Parenthood and family planning providers as Washington strips their federal support away, so no patient ever loses care because of Congress.