Matt McDermott is running in the special election for Providence City Council, Ward 2

"We must have leadership in the city that prioritizes our public schools in a way that will build them for success. That’s why I’m in it."

Matt McDermott is a Democratic strategist who has spent his career “electing leaders and winning campaigns.” Now he’s running himself for the open Ward 2 Providence City Council seat recently vacated by Helen Anthony. McDermott has served as national Co-Chair of the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund Campaign Board, helping barrier-breakers like Congresswoman Sarah McBride make history. McDermott also co-launched Out for Harris-Walz here in Rhode Island, organizing volunteers last year to bring energy and people-power to the fight for our future in key battleground states.

McDermott was recently endorsed by the RI Council 94, American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO, one of the largest public employee unions in Rhode Island. He also received endorsements from Run For Something, an organization that supports a new generation of progressive leaders running for local office, and the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, which works to elect pro-equality, pro-choice LGBTQ+ candidates to elected office.¹

We spoke outside L’Artisan Cafe & Bakery, in Wayland Square.

Steve Ahlquist: I’m going to just jump right in. First question: What made you want to run for city council?

Matt McDermott: It is fundamentally about believing in this city’s promise and the opportunity within it. My husband and I moved here to grow and raise a family. We believe in the ability of this city to nurture a family and for kids to be able to grow up here, get a great education, find a good job, find an affordable place to call home, and continue to build the future of the city that we all want to see. To that end, we as a city are facing a huge inflection point in the next year. The return of schools to local control is probably the biggest inflection point this city will face in the next decade. My husband’s a public school teacher in the city. He teaches second grade at Pleasant View Elementary up in Mount Pleasant, and the two of us look at it through his lens as an educator and our ultimate goal of raising a family here. We must have leadership in the city that prioritizes our public schools in a way that will build them for success. That’s why I’m in it. For too long, too many on the city council have treated our schools as the third rail of politics. They don’t want to touch it. They raise their hands and say, “It’s not my problem. Let someone else deal with it.” I don’t think that is an appropriate position for the council when we’re likely to get schools back next year.

Steve Ahlquist: I will skip ahead since we were talking about schools. We have an untested, new school committee. Where do they fit in? There’s an opportunity for the city council to say, “They’ve got this, we don’t have to worry about it.” You called it the third rail. What are your thoughts?

Matt McDermott: It’s a great question, and I put out an op-ed in the Providence Eye today on this issue, so you’ll have to link to it. It’s important to frame how we got to where we are today. The 2019 Johns Hopkins report set forth a lot of functional issues with the school district that ultimately led to the state takeover. One of them was the lack of a coherent leadership structure. At the time, the school board was involved but didn’t think they had purview over the budget. The council was involved, and the mayor was involved in terms of setting a vision, but it was dysfunctional. There was no consolidated leadership structure, which led to a lot of finger-pointing and a lack of alignment across our city government.

It was part of the reason why the takeover took place. As we look toward a return to local control, that is the biggest issue that the city needs to still address. What does the governance structure look like once we get schools back under local control? I believe that the three tent poles of our city government - the school board, the city council, and the mayor’s office - all have a role to play. But they have to be working together in a way that is furthering our schools and not mired in the dysfunction we saw over the previous decades. I don’t see it happening right now, which concerns me.

We are eight or so months out from a likely return. There is no public-facing working group between the mayor’s office, city council, and the school board. The mayor’s office put forth a plan earlier this year, the school board is holding listening sessions to create its own plan, and the council has basically put up its hands and said, “We’re going to focus on other issues.”

That leads me to believe that we are in much the same situation that led to the state takeover, and that has to change. We need voices on the council, and I’m hoping to be that voice as someone who sits there and says, “We have to work with the mayor’s office and the school board so we can have a governance structure in place by next summer that is going to allow us to facilitate the schools going back to local hands.

Folks ask me all the time on the doors, “What is the power of taking back our schools? Why should we even care?” For me, in addition to some of the tangible changes that the takeover promised in 2019, such as improving absenteeism, student success scores, and test scores. The biggest argument for it at the time was that we, as RIDE (Rhode Island Department of Education) and the state government, would facilitate “transformational change.” That’s the language they used. “We’re going to be able to pursue transformational change.” By any measure, that hasn’t happened. We’ve seen incremental improvements here and there. On the facility side, which was also an issue, we had decrepit facilities with rot and asbestos in our schools, so we are on the right track. There’s almost a billion dollars...

Steve Ahlquist: But that’s a statewide initiative with almost nothing to do with the takeover.

Matt McDermott: Correct. ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) money had a lot to do with that. On the facility side, we are making progress. The governance side matters, and the longer we live in the world of a state takeover, the longer we avoid the conversation about how we will govern our schools moving forward. That has to be the biggest priority next year because everything falls into place from that. What we’re seeing in our schools right now... I’ve talked to parents, students, and teachers. There is a crisis of confidence in our schools among all stakeholders. You’ve got parents, every year, not knowing where their kids might be sent for school because they find out, through the news, that their school is closed down.

We’ve got teachers facing insecurity and looking to move to other school districts due to their lack of confidence in leadership at RIDE. That crisis of confidence is what local control can solve for because there’s suddenly accountability. We know who to hold accountable now. We can hold elected officials accountable. There’s renewed trust and responsibility in that, as we are the holders of our destiny, because this is an economic development question. We cannot attract businesses and a workforce here if talented people choose between sending their kids to a failing district, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to send them to private school, or moving to the suburbs. That’s not a choice parents should be facing, which is why, for a multitude of reasons, we need leadership in this council that will prioritize our schools.

Steve Ahlquist: Beyond schools, what other issues are you hearing about when knocking on doors and talking to people?

Matt McDermott: It’s schools, housing, and infrastructure. I’ll start with infrastructure. It’s an area with great promise in the years ahead because, similar to our schools on the facilities front, there is already funding for us to see substantial improvement. Something like half a billion dollars is secured in capital investment funds between now and 2030. That is a huge pot of money already budgeted to improve our sidewalks and roadways. I’m a huge believer in and advocate for Vision Zero https://www.providenceri.gov/planning/vision-zero/. I am a huge advocate and believer in the livability and walkability of our neighborhoods. We want to live in an urban environment where, particularly on the east side, you can walk downtown and enjoy a night out, ride your bike to the east side bike path, enjoy a day in Bristol, and take the ferry back. Multimodal means of transit make our city what it is, and frankly, we should be doing more with our state partners to ensure that public transit is a part of that puzzle.

Unfortunately, I was at the RIPTA vigil last week, arguing that we need collaboration between our city and state partners to understand that public transit is non-negotiable and a key piece of the puzzle in making our city as great as it can be.

On the housing front, it will be a priority issue for the upcoming council. I firmly believe that ultimately, we build our way out of this problem, but that’s not to say there aren’t tools that we can leverage in the interim to solve for what is an obvious affordability crisis in the city. We cannot live in a city where the median income is 30% plus of what the rents are. That is unsustainable. Anyone, on any side of this issue, agrees that that is not a world we want to live in. I’ve read the city council housing report. There are a lot of tools that can be leveraged, and I’m looking forward to seeing a piece of legislation once it’s drafted.

Steve Ahlquist: My guess is that they’re going to wait until after this election...

Matt McDermott: That seems to be the case, but all options should be on the table. I’m most interested in having a dialogue about what we think will do the most good and have the most positive impact while we build our way out of the situation. No set of tools gets us to an ideal state if we are not aggressively building our way out of this situation. The good news is that the goals outlined in Housing 2030 are exactly the right state framework. As a city, we have an opportunity to treat that as a baseline and not a goal. We should be building aggressively, above those 2030 baselines. All evidence suggests that we’re starting to do that, which I am super hopeful about, but that needs to be our North Star. What tools do we use to get to 2030 with a significantly increased housing stock to functionally make the city more affordable?

Steve Ahlquist: I want to talk specifically about two of those tools. Rent stabilization will be a big fight because the mayor has said no, and the city council has said maybe. What are your thoughts on stabilization/control?

Matt McDermott: It’s a great question. The challenge in having this conversation, without a piece of legislative text, is that, if you look across the country, there is no single way to do rent stabilization. What San Francisco and Oakland did is very different than the New York model, which has been in place for generations, and is very different from what Montgomery County, Maryland, tried a few years ago. The challenge is that no approach to stabilization is equal, which means the devil is in the details, quite literally. I want to ensure we have a conversation about this and avoid situations like Montgomery County, Maryland. They earnestly approached stabilization a few years ago, facing almost the same crisis. They’re just outside of Washington, DC, and have gone generations without building housing. They had an influx of folks, particularly coming out of the pandemic, and immediately realized they had a crisis.

What did they do about it? They threw everything at the wall, including a very aggressive approach to rent stabilization, which, unfortunately for Montgomery County, Maryland, shut down housing development overnight. I mean, it literally froze development. I bring this up because there is a way to have this discussion that is conducive and leads us to a situation where we can build some stability into the system. What we have to avoid, though, is a policy like the one pursued by Montgomery County that shut down housing overnight, because we have to continue to grow.

What does stabilization look like during tenant occupancy? Do you carry stabilization through a vacancy, particularly for an old housing stock like ours in Providence, where you want to incentivize landlords to renovate the bathrooms and kitchens?

That is a problem in this city. We have a very old housing stock that hasn’t been renovated in decades. Renters in this city look at what’s available on the market and say, "Enough. We can do better.”

Steve Ahlquist: I haven’t been a renter for a while, but my kids deal with this.

Matt McDermott: We need to discuss these considerations; otherwise, you will implement something overly aggressive and stifle the opportunity to do the required work. I’m very much looking forward to the conversation, but all of us would benefit from seeing the legislative text to see what it looks like.

Steve Ahlquist: From the point of view of a person out there, in the world, talking to people, there’s a frustration with the government’s slowness in dealing with the ever-increasing rents. People are feeling the squeeze. I just want to throw in some immediacy here.

Matt McDermott: A hundred percent. I sympathize with the slowness of government. Sometimes it takes a while, particularly with a part-time council, to develop strategies and translate them into legislation. I wish we had seen the housing report earlier than we did. It’s been a long time coming, years in the making, which means we’re now into the fall of 2025 without a piece of legislative text, so it’s important that we get there pretty darn soon. I also think it’s important that all stakeholders within this community, and I’m speaking beyond this council race, do a better job of communicating what some of these legislative solutions mean and could do. I get worried about the extent to which folks have talked about rent stabilization through its ability to lower prices in this city. That’s not what stabilization does, by definition. It adds consistency and stabilization to the market. It does not lower rents. I get worried that we’re claiming that short-term tools will fundamentally change the market and lower rents, and even if that is pursued as a tool in the toolkit, it won’t happen. There are leaders in the city who could do a better job of setting expectations on what the next few years could look like because this is going to be a four- or five-year problem that we have to get ourselves out of

Steve Ahlquist: I don’t hear that level of simplicity about rent stabilization from the advocates. The advocates have a deeper understanding of rent stabilization and control than I do.

Matt McDermott: And they’re also living the reality, right? Whether it’s our schools, public transit, or housing, for too long, not just in the city but across the state, we have not listened to the lived experiences of those challenged by these realities. That has got to change. A number of parents in this city found out that their child was no longer allowed to go to school via news headlines. The school was closing without any heads up. Whether it’s on housing or public transit. We’re finding out after the fact that riders who require RIPTA to live their lives are finding out about route cancellations after the fact, at the 11th hour. That can’t keep happening. We need to bring people to the table and have these conversations because these decisions affect people’s lives.

Steve Ahlquist: It was great to see the advocates pushing for RIPTA and legislators slowly coming to understand the importance of public transportation.

Matt McDermott: That is where we lose sight of political leadership in Rhode Island - your job as a leader to bring people with you, right? I went to the RIPTA rally a week ago. You were there, Steve. How many other candidates were there in this race? How many other elected officials were there?

Steve Ahlquist: Gubernatorial candidate Helena Foulkes and Senator Tiara Mack and Representative Jennifer Stewart were there.

Matt McDermott: Correct.

Out of over a hundred legislators, an entire city council, and four candidates in this race, there were four candidates or legislators. That has got to change. We need leaders in this city who understand that their soapbox matters and that showing up to these things adds credibility. There is power in activism, and local activists, on various issues in this community, are doing an enormous lift. They need elected officials to have their back, and, unfortunately, we have too many situations where they are nowhere to be found.

Steve Ahlquist: Part of my work is to be a bridge between advocacy groups and legislators. The number of times I’ve seen advocates treated with casual disrespect by elected officials is just appalling.

I want to talk about immigration, ICE, and policing. Mayor Smiley issued an executive order, but David Morales,² who’s running a primary campaign against the mayor, pointed out that people had been grabbed by ICE and said that the Mayor’s executive order was inadequate.

Matt McDermott: The law in Providence is black and white, right? Police cannot engage with, interact with, or facilitate ICE in this city. It’s black and white, clear-cut, and has been through four years, and, to the extent we need to reiterate that to folks in this city, we need to do that. As I have seen and understood it, that is part of the discussion over the past few months, but that is black and white. As leaders in this city, we need to be clear-eyed about the realities we will face. In addition to ICE, we are sitting, as of midnight last night, in a government shutdown. That gives unusual and enormous power to the executive branch to make decisions, outside of normal processes, and when it comes to funding mechanisms, too.

I worry, in addition to issues with ICE, about the realities that we are seeing: The National Guard brought into cities and the power of the purse strings to literally shut down funding mechanisms for our schools due to lawsuits related to absurd race-based political ideologies. We need leaders in local government who understand that the national reality will manifest at the local level. It’s happening in cities across America. We need to be thoughtful and proactive about dealing with it. The situation a few months ago, with ICE enforcement in the city and it’s still ongoing, is, in some respects, not unique to Providence. It’s emblematic of getting caught flatfooted, not appreciating the extent to which this administration will use any and all levers of power, including illegally, to do what they want. We need leaders across our city, state, and federally in Congress who understand that we are in abnormal times. That requires a unique understanding of the political landscape you probably didn’t need in elected office years ago.

Steve Ahlquist: You’re right about that. Senator Jack Reed might use terms like “my friends across the aisle,” but that’s not a reality anymore. It’s a different world.

Matt McDermott: Everyone’s evolving in real time to this new normal. We’re seeing a lot of case studies of people standing up and saying, “Enough is enough. We need to fight back,” but I believe that we need fighters at every level of government. I am running because these issues require a fighter on the city level - our schools, housing affordability, and public infrastructure. But I also believe we need fighters who understand the national moment we’re in and can use the bully pulpit effectively, in a way that, frankly, Rhode Island politicians often avoid.

Steve Ahlquist: The only one who’s been doing that is Attorney General Peter Neronha [Though Secretary of State Gregg Amore recently drew a line in the sand.] Neronha has been aggressively fighting back.

Matt McDermott: Our livelihoods and our economy are on the line. The ability to wake up one morning, shut down the Revolution Wind project, and upend the future of energy production in this state put hundreds of jobs on the line - with a signature. That is the reality that we face. We are uniquely positioned to have an incredible economic opportunity in renewable energy over the coming decades. Still, livelihoods are upended overnight by this administration in a way that I don’t think elected officials came to understand until they came to realize the realities of how that permeates.

Steve Ahlquist: Imagine being in high school, in a special program training you and giving you the skills to build wind turbines, when suddenly the president says, “No more wind.” Now you’re 17 years old, thinking, “What am I going to high school for? My whole future just vanished.”

Matt McDermott: A hundred percent. And look, Rhode Island has unique opportunities in the year ahead because we have progressively pursued climate-related issues. Act on Climate, by any measure, is one of the most preeminent progressive climate policies in the United States. We need to meet those metrics - unfortunately, we’re falling short of them right now.

Steve Ahlquist: I agree, though I’d love to be surprised.

Matt McDermott: I continue to be inspired by the aspiration of the possibility. But Act on Climate requires us to be a leader on these issues, and we’re dealing with an administration that can upend our state policy priorities overnight. That underscores why we need leaders at all levels of our government who understand that everything we do relates to the federal government. Understanding those issues is critically important for everything we say and enact the protections we enact within those pieces of legislation to avoid federal intervention.

Steve Ahlquist: Are there any other issues you can think of that I should have brought up?

Matt McDermott: We talked a little bit about public infrastructure, but I want to touch on it a little more. It is so important. One of the things I am yearning to see from leadership in this district, and something I will prioritize, is dealing with the realities of the crises that have impacted this neighborhood uniquely, and how much there is still to be done. The Washington Bridge crisis devastated this community and our businesses.

Steve Ahlquist: All this traffic behind us is a product of that bridge failure.

Matt McDermott: Correct. We are a community. By that, I mean that we who love living in an urban environment, love walkability and love bikeability - that has been, without question, negatively impacted by the Washington Bridge crisis. A lot of work needs to be done on our streetscapes to improve pedestrian safety and walkability. It is one of the biggest benefits of living in this community.

I don’t think we’ve had the kind of local/state partnership to get us to a place that has fully resolved those issues. I mean, we can see it right now. It’s another point I consistently hear on the doors. Look, there are a lot of macro level issues for us to tackle over the coming years, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that there are a lot of tangible things that we can be doing in terms of stop signs and speed limits, so we’re actually building a neighborhood that’s recognizing the fact that we have a crisis on our hands and that for the next few years, we’re going to be dealing with that.

Steve Ahlquist: One of the things I love about covering local races is how we can talk about something like Revolution Wind and out-of-control presidents one second, and then switch over to stop signs and curbs the next.

Can you give me your assessment of the mayor and the city council?

Matt McDermott: Let me answer by first talking about the working relationship between the two, because I think that speaks to my viewpoint on the issue, which is that a lot of us, from the outside looking in, do not see the type of collaboration between our council and the mayor’s administration that is necessary to further progress in the city. There are many reasons for that, and I don’t think it’s just a perception many of us have on the outside looking in. Those internally would say the same thing, which has to change. Whether you disagree on policy or your ideological view of the world, for this city to move forward, we need a council that can work with the mayor’s office, whoever that is, and vice versa.

We need a mayor who can work with the council in a way that will move legislation forward. Too often, we’ve seen situations where the council pursues a strategy, oftentimes performative - and I don’t mean that in a nefarious way, but through the lens of an ordinance or a citation that doesn’t legislatively enact change because, in part, they don’t have the working relationship with the mayor’s office to come together and actually pursue policy. The same applies to our school board as we think about our schools returning next year. All of which is to say: We have to have a dialogue between those three tent poles of our city government. What’s been missing, and part of why I’m running: I can be a voice that bridges that divide. I have a working relationship with the mayor. We get along really well. I also sympathize with and associate myself with many of this council’s legislative priorities, which is to say, on 99% of things, we can get this council and the mayor’s administration together to move things forward. For too long, we’ve been mired in dysfunction between those entities.

Steve Ahlquist: They came together fast when the financial crisis necessitated a tax increase. They pulled together, unified. It wasn’t a popular thing, but they did it together.

Matt McDermott: A hundred percent. That is evidence that it can be done. Look, I am an eternal optimist. It’s part of what drives my philosophy, but I’m also of the belief that there is a collective action problem in the city, which is that we know what the issues and problems are - there is some disagreement on solutions - but by and large, everyone is mostly in agreement on what those solutions could look like. I think we need to get people together. I’ll also just say, on the council side, we live in a city facing a government structure that makes legislating challenging. We have 15 wards in this city of 200,000 people. It is a unique structure that most mid-size towns don’t have.

It means that 15 different people, from 15 very distinct and diverse wards, with 15 very different priorities and care-abouts, must get in a room together and make decisions. That’s hard. It means that everyone needs to step up to the plate and work together. Frankly, not to get too far over the skis here, I would like to see us have conversations as we talk about what the future of our democracy looks like. Even in a city like ours, there are opportunities to discuss better ways for us to govern. David Segel pursued these ideas 20 or 30 years ago, about whether we should have at-large members on our council.

Steve Ahlquist: I would like to see that, to be honest.

Matt McDermott: There are arguments for and against it. One of the arguments for it is that too often we have folks on the council representing their ward, but those interests don’t reflect the shared realities of this city in a way that allows us to move forward. We need more voices on our council willing to sit at that table and say, “I am looking out for the best interest of everyone in this city. I am looking through the lens that a rising tide lifts all boats.” There are opportunities in the coming years to pursue those conversations because there is inequity in this city, and one of the ways you solve for that is by getting more folks into the council who recognize that there are shared realities in those inequities and making sure that we solve for them.

Steve Ahlquist: I like the idea because at-large legislators have experience running citywide races, so we would have two or three city councilmembers ready to step into the mayorship. Right now, mayors seem randomly generated from outside the political structure.

Matt McDermott: It breaks down silos because the lived experiences across the city are vastly different. We need more leaders across our city government who understand the diversity of those lived experiences and come to the table with policy priorities that reflect that and don’t just reflect the microcosm of their own ward-based silo.

Steve Ahlquist: It’s also true that we’ve never had a mayor elected who didn’t win the east side, at least in my memory. That’s another equity issue: If you can’t win the east side, you can’t be mayor.

Matt McDermott: I hope there will be an active conversation about rank choice voting in this upcoming legislative session. It is certainly not within the council’s purview, but I very much appreciate the work that our state delegation is doing to pursue this. Representative Rebecca Kislak, in particular, has been a big advocate for this at the state level.

There are real opportunities to leverage ranked choice voting in every election in our state, but at the local level, we need to be electing folks into office who have a majority coalition behind them to pursue the mantle of governance that’s necessary to move progress forward. Look at the gubernatorial elections over the past few cycles. We consistently elect folks with a minority plurality winning primaries. I don’t think that’s healthy for our democracy, because it means that on day one, you have folks taking office with the vast majority of voters in the state saying, “I’m not really happy with the result of this.” So, while I am hopeful that we finally have energy in the state delegation, I’m thankful for those in the Providence delegation who have pursued this because, look, I brought this up earlier at a time when trusting government is low, but at a time when people are rightfully worried about the future of our democracy, there is work that we can pursue on the local level to make our government work better, make our elections work better, and really represent people.

I bring it up because, as a democratic strategist, I do polling in my political profession. A few weeks ago, there was an interesting data point at the end of the URI Rhode Island Survey Initiative. A lot of media attention was on the governor’s race, and they put a lot of emphasis on housing affordability in their poll, but what got basically no coverage was that at the very end of their poll, they asked a trust in government question. Do you trust the federal government, the state government, and the local government? There was no daylight between trust in the local government versus the federal government. Right now, 10% of voters trust their local government, which tells me that we have a crisis in Washington and at the local level.

I truly believe that all politics is local and that what’s going on in Washington matters just as much as what we can do locally to improve the lives of people in this city. When 90% of voters in this state say, “I don’t feel like I can trust folks in my local community who are supposed to be leading us through these crises,” that is a problem. We are in a democratic crisis as a country, but part of how we solve for that is at the local level. People need to feel that the government is out to benefit them and tangibly improve their lives. For too long, folks in this state have felt like the government’s not serving them, and politicians are out for their own interest, not theirs. There’s work we can do at the local level to change that perception, because if we don’t, we truly are in a democratic crisis.

Steve Ahlquist: We’re in a bit of a spiral.

Matt McDermott: And everyone, including those at the local level, has a job to play in changing that.

Steve Ahlquist: That’s a pretty good way to end this.

1. Matt McDermott Endorsed by Key Labor Union, Two National Organizations

Candidate for Ward 2 City Council seat secures backing of AFSCME, LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, and Run for Something

Candidate for Providence’s Ward 2 City Council seat, Matt McDermott, announced that he has received endorsements from a key labor union and two national organizations. RI Council 94, American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO, one of the largest public employee unions in Rhode Island, gave McDermott its support. Joining them were Run For Something, an organization that supports a new generation of progressive leaders running for local office, and the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, which works to elect pro-equality, pro-choice LGBTQ+ candidates to elected office.

“I’m proud to say that our campaign has quickly earned the support of organizations that reflect both my values and the urgency of this election,” McDermott said. “Together, these endorsements highlight the coalition we’re building. I’m running to ensure our city lives up to its promise—for this generation and the next—because Providence has incredible potential, if we work together to achieve it.”

“Rhode Island’s public service workers deserve champions at every level of government, and Matt will be a fighter on the Providence City Council,” said Michael McDonald, President of RI Council 94. “As someone from a union family and a union household, he understands the challenges our members face and will be a strong voice for Providence’s working people.”

“We know that decisions made in city halls are just as important as those made in Washington,” Evan Low, President and CEO of the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, added. “We need leaders like MattMcDermott to defend our values and deliver transparent, community-led governance.”

“Bold leaders like Matt McDermott are at the forefront of the fight for our rights and freedoms at a time when they have never faced greater threats,” said Amanda Litman, Co-Founder and President of Run for Something. “Run for Something is proud to endorse Matt as part of our latest class of leaders working to secure lasting change in their communities.”

2. Statement from David Morales on continued ICE activity in Providence

On September 22, Mayor Smiley signed a performative Executive Order, which repeats our city’s existing ‘sanctuary policy’ that he has failed to enforce.

The very next day, masked ICE agents detained a neighbor outside the RI Superior Court in front of his son. It took less than 24 hours for the mayor to fall flat on his promise to protect our immigrant neighbors in Providence as he stayed silent.

That same week, a second masked ICE incident occurred on Cranston Street.

While the mayor remains silent as ICE continues to terrorize our communities, I encourage all our neighbors to stay vigilant and call the Deportation Defense Network regarding any suspected ICE activity in Providence.

Every Providence neighbor deserves to feel safe in our city.