Around New England

Rhode Island Using National Guard To Monitor State Borders

April 2, 2020

The Rhode Island National Guard is ready to track who is coming into the Ocean State.

According to The Hartford Courant, the soldiers began appearing at checkpoints near the Connecticut border on Wednesday, April 1 to track the information of those with out-of-state license plates.

That information will then be relayed to the state’s health department. From there, the health department will contact those visitors to check on their well-being and assess the risk that they are carrying coronavirus. Currently, anyone entering Rhode Island for non-work purposes is required to self-quarantine for 14 days. Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo issued that executive order on Saturday, March 28.

The American Civil Liberties Union is not happy about these measures.

“The ACLU remains very concerned about the enormous breadth of the governor’s latest directive and its focus on out-of-staters at a time when the state acknowledges that half of Rhode Islanders themselves are not following social distancing rules,” ACLU Rhode Island executive director Steven Brown told the Hartford Courant. “A two-week quarantine solely for the ‘offense’ of coming from out of state, and with no opportunity to contest this demand, is deeply troubling.