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By State Representative Erika Uyterhoeven

It has been the honor of my life to serve three terms as your State Representative here in Somerville. I am now running to be your next State Senator because I believe the fights I have led on transparency, accountability, and immigrant rights need to be front and center in Beacon Hill. Some constituents have asked me: how did you come to run for State Representative in the first place? It’s true that I was formerly an antitrust economist, not a career politician. The answer begins with a failure: During Donald Trump’s first term in office, the Massachusetts legislature passed zero bills to protect immigrants.

I found this outrageous because hundreds of people testified in favor of the Safe Communities Act, representing countless more who supported it but couldn’t take a whole day off to wait hours in a packed hearing room. Courageous immigrants, including parents, children, workers, as well as faith leaders, community organizers, and even some in law enforcement, came to the State House and told their stories. They asked for basic protections: that local police not be turned into an extension of ICE, that courthouses and schools remain safe, that families not be ripped apart.

The response from Beacon Hill was silence. The Safe Communities Act died in committee with no vote.

How was that possible? How could hundreds of people give testimony, only for a bill to disappear without a single recorded vote?

The answer was simple: legislators on Beacon Hill kept most votes they took hidden from the public. Committee votes were secret and there was no way to know which legislators killed the bill and which ones fought for it. The system protected legislators from accountability, and it did not protect immigrants from deportation.

That is why I co-founded Act on Mass, the only organization in Massachusetts dedicated to fighting for legislative transparency. We ran ballot questions across dozens of districts asking voters whether committee votes should be public, and we won with an average of 87% support. There are no shortcuts, we organized, we advocated, and we built power. That work is what led me to run for State Representative: because I saw that the lack of transparency was the reason our immigrant neighbors were left unprotected. Their silence was a choice, and secrecy made that choice possible.

After years of advocating inside and outside the State House as your State Representative, we won a historic change: all committee votes are now publicly available and all written testimony is posted after hearings. These reforms did not happen because Beacon Hill decided on its own to be more open. They happened because people across the Commonwealth demanded it.

When Trump returned to office, the same voices that had been silent during his first term tried to claim that there was nothing the state could do to protect immigrants. That was the federal government’s responsibility, they said. We made our demands clear, and we proved them wrong.

This year, the Massachusetts legislature is passing two major bills that will protect immigrant families right here in the Commonwealth.

The PROTECT Act establishes statewide standards for interactions between state and local law enforcement and federal civil immigration enforcement. Both the House and Senate versions prohibit police from inquiring about a person’s immigration status, restrict the use of state and local resources for civil immigration enforcement, and require a judicial warrant for ICE arrests at courthouses. The Senate version goes further by creating statutory protections for sensitive locations including schools, houses of worship, and health care facilities. Both versions restrict new 287(g) agreements, the formal contracts that turn state agencies into arms of the deportation machine. Massachusetts is currently the only blue state in America with an active 287(g) agreement, through the Department of Correction, which has transferred more than 2,000 people to ICE. Neither version terminates that existing agreement, a gap I will continue to fight to close.

The Consumer Data Privacy Act bans the sale of the geolocation data ICE has been using to target our immigrant neighbors. Right now, apps on your phone collect your geolocation data: where you sleep, where you work, which stores you shop at, your movement patterns. That data is packaged by companies you have never heard of and sold to the highest bidder. ICE has spent millions of dollars purchasing commercial location data from data brokers to track down and target immigrants. This bill bans the sale of precise geolocation data and classifies immigration status as sensitive personal data that cannot be sold or shared without explicit consent. It cuts off the flow of data that ICE has been buying to locate people.

These are massive steps forward and they happened because we made votes and testimony public, thereby making it impossible for legislators to quietly kill bills that the vast majority of their constituents supported. With transparency, people across the state demanded that the State House take action to protect immigrant families. That is how change works: by shining light on the problem so we can organize, advocate, and win.

However, the work continues. Both bills are now in conference committee, where legislators are working out the final details. The House and Senate must reconcile their versions of both bills and we need to ensure that the strongest language from each makes it to the final version.

If you want to stay informed about what you can do to make these bills stronger, including a breakdown of each bill, please sign up for my newsletter at electerika.com or follow me on social media for updates. This fight is not over but we have come a long way from the days when hundreds of people like you could be met with silence on Beacon Hill.

Erika Uyterhoeven represents the 27th Middlesex District (Somerville) in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and is a candidate for the 2nd Middlesex State Senate seat, which includes Somerville, Medford, parts of Cambridge, and Winchester.