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Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha spoke this week with morning host Luis Hernandez about his plans for responding to executive actions coming out of the White House.
Interview Highlights
On the future of the federal funding freeze
Peter Neronha: We’re not convinced the freeze is over, so that’s why we continued with our lawsuit, and we expect Judge McConnell here in the district of Rhode Island federal court to issue the restraining order that we have asked for, which is to form a court order to halt that freeze. And let’s talk about what the freeze is about. It’s money that the Congress has already allocated to Rhode Island and our sister states and territories that we’re entitled to. This isn’t President Trump’s money in the first place. The money always goes through the Congress. And the way this works, if you think about it, is we pay our federal taxes, they go to Washington, some of that money is used to fund the federal government, but the rest is supposed to come back to us. And what the Trump administration has effectively done is halted that money, and that impacts us in so many ways.
He does not have the right to cut off federal funding that has already been allocated by the Congress. Now we think he’s violated the law in a number of ways. He’s violated something called the Administrative Procedures Act, which is sort of a decision-making process that you have to go through before you change any kind of agency decision-making. It violates basic constitutional principles around the Spending Clause of the U.S. Constitution, the 10th Amendment. So there are lots of ways in which this action, trying to haul back money that the Congress has already allocated to the states, is unconstitutional. The Congress has the power of the purse.
On immigration and ICE entering schools
Neronha: They [ICE] can go anywhere. They had in the past chosen not to go into schools and churches or synagogues or other places of worship. The Trump administration issued some policy statements that said there were no more sanctuaries in schools or in churches. And so what this has done is you might expect among communities where there are undocumented immigrants, parents are afraid to send their children to school, and so what we have tried to do is to let those schools know that immigration officials can’t come into those schools, the non-public areas of the school, which is anything inside the school itself, they can’t come in there without a warrant, a judicial warrant, and that’s designed to give all children, whether you’re undocumented or not, a place of minimum disruption. We don’t believe that immigration authorities should be taking action in those schools unless there’s a real public safety need to do so.
We had heard from the Department of Education who reached out to us. Commissioner Infante-Green reached out to us and asked for our help to give them guidance, legal guidance, on what immigration authorities could and couldn’t do. And so that’s what we did. We reviewed the law, and we gave our guidance based on the law to those schools. And what that guidance was designed to do was to calm fears in some of our school systems where there are undocumented immigrant children that ICE would not be coming into the schools to arrest those undocumented children simply for being in the country unlawfully. As you can imagine, that causes enormous chaos for every child in the school, not just ones that are undocumented.
On the judicial system
Neronha: I’ve been a lawyer for a long time and practiced mostly in Rhode Island over the course of my 30-year career, but I understand that as the courts have become more politicized, frankly, by both parties over the last 10 to 15 years, it shakes confidence in the court. Every time I read about a federal judge and I read in the same sentence who appointed them, which president, I cringe a little bit. I practiced in federal court as an assistant United States attorney for over a decade and I never thought once who appointed those judges.
I’d like to think that’s what they still do. I have great confidence in our federal judiciary here in Rhode Island. I don’t know what it’s like elsewhere, but I understand skepticism. And look, when the Supreme Court in recent years has turned long standing jurisprudence like Roe v. Wade on its head, I can certainly understand why Americans might not have faith in the court system, but that’s where I as an attorney general, as a lawyer for the people, that’s my battlefield, and that’s where we’re going to fight on behalf of Rhode Islanders and Americans.
On being prepared for the future
Neronha: The Democratic attorneys general, I don’t want to say we saw this coming, but we knew we had to be prepared for the possibility. Last summer, we had at one point 50, little over 50, issues where we thought we would need to act on behalf of the people of our respective states, and frankly, on behalf of all Americans. And so we’ve been preparing for a long time, more than six months. We are ready.
I believe this is the first time we filed this kind of multi-state [case] in the district of Rhode Island, and where a Rhode Island assistant attorney general has led the arguments in court. That’s because we built an office capable of doing it. That’s what preparation means. But then when the issues are upon us, you have to be ready to act. You can’t take a wait and see approach. We know what this meant, and we knew what it meant to Rhode Islanders and, with my sister states, Americans all across the country. That’s why we acted as quickly as we did.
