Providence Sen. Tiara Mack, right, leads the audience in snapping as Rep. David Morales, also of Providence, makes opening remarks at a speaking program on policy priorities this year for the Rhode Island Black, Latino, Indigenous, Asian-American and Pacific Islander Caucus on March 11, 2025. The caucus announced 15 recently introduced bills aimed at addressing racial and economic disparities. (Photo by Alexander Castro/Rhode Island Current)
Rhode Island’s lawmakers of color unveiled their legislative agenda Tuesday, showcasing a suite of 15 bills that includes proposals to eliminate predatory loans, tweak public education funding, and protect immigrants.
The Rhode Island Black, Latino, Indigenous, Asian-American and Pacific Islander (RIBLIA) Caucus consists of 21 Democratic members working across both chambers of the Rhode Island General Assembly on legislation that uplifts the state’s communities of color and level the playing field wrought by racial inequity.
“This caucus, while composed primarily of people of color, is about all Rhode Islanders,” Sen. Tiara Mack of Providence, who co-chairs the group, said in her opening remarks. “When we uplift the most marginalized, everyone in Rhode Island thrives.”
Minimum wage hike bills draw maximum crowds to R.I. State House
The members of the caucus comprise about 18% of both the House of Representatives and the Rhode Island Senate.
“We are here to make sure that Rhode Island is a place where everyone, no matter of racial background, their zip code or immigration status, can thrive,” Rep. David Morales of Providence, also a co-chair, told a crowd assembled on the top floor of the Rhode Island State House.
Each of the 15 proposals has versions in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Some of this year’s bills are reruns from previous legislative sessions, reflecting perennial efforts like a proposal to end payday lending. The bill would prohibit the practice of these speedy loans, which are often used by people with low incomes and few financial means to make ends meet quickly.
But past years have consistently seen the payday lending legislation trounced, with some observers citing Senate President Dominick Ruggerio as the main obstacle. The legislation is again led by last year’s sponsors Sen. Ana Quezada of Providence and Rep. Karen Alzate of Pawtucket. No Senate hearing has been scheduled so far, but Alzate’s version is scheduled to be heard Thursday before the House Committee on Corporations.
“It is no secret that Rhode Island is facing a lot of challenges, especially for residents and communities of color,” Mack said. “Daily costs are rising at alarming rates, and our state’s essential systems are struggling and being stretched thin.”
Other bills seek to shore up in-state protections for undocumented people living under President Donald Trump’s administration. Another repeat bill, now in its fifth year of being proposed, would reduce the maximum prison sentence for misdemeanors from one year to 364 days.
A single day can make a big difference, explained the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Leonela Felix of Pawtucket, when it comes to defining criminality at the federal level. A one-year sentence can trigger deportation or other severe penalties for noncitizens, including green card holders and asylees.
When we uplift the most marginalized, everyone in Rhode Island thrives.
– Sen. Tiara Mack of Providence, co-chair, Rhode Island Black, Latino, Indigenous, Asian-American and Pacific Islander Caucus
Felix gave the example of shoplifting a $50 T-shirt as a misdemeanor. “For that offense usually, in the state of Rhode Island, you won’t receive a jail sentence. They will suspend it,” Felix said.
But technically the crime could still incur a year of jail time, which would make it a “crime of moral turpitude” and therefore applicable within deportation law.
“By changing the maximum sentence to 364 days, we remove the unintended immigration consequences while maintaining judicial and prosecutorial discretion,” Felix said, adding that “Nothing in this bill removes the discretion of judges, removes the discretion of prosecutors to appropriately charge an individual as they see fit.”
Sen. Jonathon Acosta of Central Falls introduced the 364-day bill on the Senate side. It went through committee hearings and passed the floor on Feb. 25. and now heads to the House Committee on Judiciary, although a hearing date has not been specified. Another bill by Acosta would forbid public contracts or leasing of state- or municipal-owned property for immigrant detention centers.
Acosta also spoke Tuesday about his bill to retool the education funding formula. The state mostly uses food stamp enrollment to determine how many low-income students are in a school district, which is then used to determine how much the district gets in per-pupil funding from the state.
“We’ve spent over a decade trying to address some of the shortcomings in our funding formula. At this point, everybody and their mama has a plan for how to fix it,” Acosta said.
But the number of students living in poverty is being undercounted by about 6,000 kids, Acosta said, citing data from the state’s education and human services departments. That’s why his bill would use Medicaid enrollment in the funding formula to better determine the number of low-income students in a district — a step in the right direction, Acosta thought, even if “there may be other parts of the formula that will take years to fix.”
Another Medicaid-related bill in the package is sponsored by Sen. Linda Ujifusa of Portsmouth, which would impose greater transparency and reporting regulations on pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, which are frequently cited as contributing to prescription drug cost hikes. Ujifusa’s bill specifically targets the managed care organizations that work with PBMs to provide prescription benefits for Medicaid recipients.
“We don’t pay any attention to these middlemen,” Ujifusa said of the Ocean State. “But guess who does pay attention? Ohio, Texas, West Virginia, Kentucky — not the most left leaning states, right? Those guys have regulated pharmacy benefit managers, and by doing so, they lowered prescription costs for consumers.”
A complete roster of RIBLIA’s bills is available on the General Assembly website.
What’s the status of the bills?
Many of the bills in the RIBLIA package have been referred to committees but have not yet had a hearing date scheduled. As of Wednesday, Alzate’s payday lending legislation was the only bill with an immediate hearing date — scheduled to be heard Thursday before the House Committee on Corporations.
The only bill to have passed in one chamber is the 364-day misdemeanor bill by Acosta.
On March 5, labor committees in both chambers heard their respective versions of a bill that would incrementally raise the minimum wage to $20 by 2030. The bills were held for further study, which is standard when a bill is first heard.
Also heard and held in the House that same night was a bill by Rep. Joshua Giraldo of Central Falls to create greater transparency for workers’ paystubs. “Imagine getting a paycheck that’s just a single number or a single amount with no breakdown of the hours, your overtime hours, your travel pay, leaving you to guess whether or not you’ve been paid fairly,” Giraldo said at Tuesday’s event.
At its hearing last week in the House Committee on Labor, Giraldo’s paystub bill got some positive feedback from Rep. Marie Hopkins, a freshman Republican from Warwick.
“I’ve received paychecks that were obscured, that required me to go find HR and ask them what was going on, and then experience the frustration of getting no answers and feeling cheated with more than one employer, including as a nurse,” Hopkins told Giraldo. “It never occurred to me, as an employee, that this [should be] a right of mine… I find this to be a really great topic on the subject of transparency, and I’m glad somebody thought of it.”
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