Puerto Rico's Senate has approved a bill that was written to lock the island's immigrant-student school protections into law — but passed only after amendments removed several of the strongest safeguards in it, setting off a fight that reached New York City Hall within a day. Senate Bill 1062 (PS 1062), the proposed Educational Equity Law for Immigrant Students and Students With Undefined Immigration Status, was approved in the Senate's ordinary session on Thursday, November 5, by 18 senators of the governing New Progressive Party (PNP) and two of the Popular Democratic Party (PPD); two Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) legislators and two independents voted against, and the rest abstained or were absent, El Nuevo Día reported.

Source: El Nuevo Día, Nov. 7, 2026

The bill, authored by majority Senator Nitza Morán Trinidad, creates in statute a guarantee that every minor has the right to a public, free and compulsory education regardless of immigration status — in the words used on the Senate floor, for minors up to 21 years of age in the Department of Education — and sets out protections covering school enrolment, confidentiality of student information, discrimination and harassment, and interventions by immigration authorities inside school buildings, according to the Senate's own announcement. Senate President Thomas Rivera Schatz spoke in favour of the measure.

Source: Senate of Puerto Rico, Nov. 6, 2026

A bill written to lock in the protocol schools already follow

PS 1062 began as an attempt to convert the Department of Education's existing protocol into permanent law. That protocol, implemented in February 2025 as ICE raids intensified on the island, is the only one of its kind prepared by a Puerto Rico agency, El Nuevo Día noted. Under it, no minor may be detained at a school without a judicial order, and the department's Office of Legal Affairs must certify that any intervention is lawful before it proceeds.

The protocol also bars schools from giving federal agents access to a minor student, or information about the student, their attendance or their location, without the prior authorisation of a parent or guardian, the regional superintendent or the Office of Legal Affairs. No minor may be questioned or interviewed without the presence of a parent or legal guardian or, failing that, diplomatic representation from the student's country of origin. It was reviewed in January 2025 by the then Dominican consul on the island, César Cedeño Ávila, and by the Homeland Security Investigations chief who then directed enforcement in Puerto Rico.

What the amendments took out

In the Senate's Government and Education committees, that text was changed in ways critics say invert its purpose. Struck from the bill was the clause that read: “While the legality of the intervention is being validated, the student shall remain protected in a safe place in the school, without being handed over to or questioned by any federal agent.” Also removed was the ban on immigration interventions during class hours, or inside classrooms and other spaces where they would interrupt other students' right to education, and advocates questioned the removal of the legal analysis that was required before student data could be handed over.

Source: El Nuevo Día, Nov. 7, 2026

PIP Senator Adrián González Costa warned that the final clause of Article 7 — added in committee and absent from the original bill — could be dangerous in the hands of an agent seeking to intervene with a student. The clause states that nothing in the law “shall have the effect of imposing additional conditions on the exercise of the powers conferred on federal authorities, requiring authorisation from officials of the Government of Puerto Rico for the execution of legally authorised federal actions, nor impeding, delaying or obstructing their fulfilment.” González Costa argued the amendments had created “a state of law contrary to the protections the Department of Education currently has,” and noted that the education secretary had favoured the original project, not the amended one.

One widely criticised committee change did not survive. The committee version would have let immigration agents enter a school on a mere administrative order or subpoena — an administrative warrant issued by immigration officials themselves, not a judge — but on the Senate floor the bill's own author, Morán Trinidad, presented a final amendment removing “administrative orders” as a route into schools, after minority legislators objected. The PPD's Senate spokesperson, Luis Javier Hernández, who was excused from the vote for a university activity in Aguadilla, said his delegation understood that the most critical committee amendment had been fixed in the final version — but conceded that, had he been present, “I would not have voted in favour of the project.” PPD Senator Ada Álvarez Conde, also absent, had taken a turn speaking against the measure.

The federal side: schools, hospitals and churches are “sensitive locations”

Rebecca González Ramos, director in Puerto Rico of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the investigative arm of ICE, said on Tuesday that her commitment not to carry out operations in schools or churches remains in force: “Schools, hospitals and churches are considered 'sensitive locations.' We respect that sensitive location. If there has been any intervention in a church, in a hospital or in a school, it is because there have been individuals who have run toward that periphery,” she said, according to El Nuevo Día. Interventions inside churches and schools have nonetheless been reported during the recent raids — including an operation at the San Antonio de Padua church in Río Piedras during the October 22–25 enforcement wave in Santurce and Río Piedras.

Friday night: New York's mayor and attorney general join the pushback

On Friday night, November 6, New York state elected officials, Puerto Rican and Dominican community leaders and immigrant-rights advocates held an emergency press conference at the Caribe Hilton in San Juan, during the SOMOS Puerto Rico conference, demanding that ICE stay out of Puerto Rico's schools. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said: “We have seen firsthand the devastation ICE causes in NYC… We will not stay silent while our Puerto Rican neighbors, who are so often treated as second class citizens, are targeted.” New York Attorney General Letitia James said: “ICE has no place in our children's schools. Not in New York, and not in Puerto Rico.” The speakers — who also included Assemblymember Karines Reyes, chair of SOMOS, Council Member Alexa Avilés, Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs Commissioner Faiza N. Ali and New York Immigration Coalition president Murad Awawdeh — called on Puerto Rico's House of Representatives to reject PS 1062 in its amended form and restore its original protections: a judicial warrant signed by a judge before any immigration intervention in a school, mandatory legal review before student or family data is disclosed, and an end to the island government sharing residents' personal information with immigration authorities without a court order.

Source: New York Immigration Coalition, Nov. 6, 2026

At the same SOMOS conference on Friday, Juan Dalmau Ramírez, secretary general of the PIP and its 2024 candidate for governor, condemned the Senate measure alongside Mayor Mamdani, saying the PNP and PPD had allied “to allow abuses and terror against vulnerable children in schools, a place he called sacred,” and pledging to fight the ICE raids themselves. Puerto Rico's Resident Commissioner Pablo José Hernández, who also leads the PPD, said he would analyse the bill's final text before criticising his own party's senators who backed it, while stating his public position plainly: “Zero ICE in the schools, in the hospitals, in the churches.”

Source: El Nuevo Día, Nov. 7, 2026

What happens next

The final text was sent to the House of Representatives on Friday night. If the House approves it without amendments, it goes to Governor Jenniffer González for her evaluation and signature; any House change would send it back to the Senate. Advocates say the House fight is now the last chance to restore the deleted protections — the safe-place rule, the class-hours ban and the legal review of data requests — before a weakened version of a protection bill becomes the law that replaces a stronger protocol schools already follow. For immigrant families in Puerto Rico, many of them from the Dominican Republic, the practical question is immediate: whether the rules that today keep a child from being questioned at school without a parent present will still be there, in law, when the next enforcement wave arrives.