RI ?❤️ NY: Rhode Island Governor Institutes Border Checks, Mandatory 14-Day Coronavirus Quarantine for New Yorkers Entering the State

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The nation’s smallest state doesn’t have much love for the nation’s biggest city right now.

That’s because New York City has become the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. and so Rhode Island is attempting to strongly discourage or isolate anyone from the Empire State trying to enter.

Per Bloomberg, Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo ordered state police to set up border checkpoints on Friday to single out cars with New York license plates so the occupants could be questioned and possibly quarantined for two weeks before interacting with her state’s residents. Currently, Rhode Island  has just a few hundred confirmed cases of COVID-19, while New York’s infections have skyrocketed into the tens of thousands.

Raimondo also mobilized the state’s National Guard to conduct checks at all major transportation hubs as well as house-to-house inspections to locate anyone who has traveled from New York since March 12 and demand that they self-isolate for 14 days as well. Penalties for non-compliance include a $500 fine and up to three months in jail.

The governor officially signed the executive order on Thursday and it covers anyone who has been in New York during the past two weeks. It is set to expire no sooner than April 25, but could be extended. Public health, public safety, and health-care workers are exempted from the decree.

But the order might not survive long on constitutional grounds, as the local ACLU chapter immediately objected to the decree’s onerous nature on Fourth Amendment grounds.

“While the Governor may have the power to suspend some state laws and regulations to address this medical emergency, she cannot suspend the Constitution,” Rhode Island ACLU executive director Steven Brown said, per Bloomberg. “Under the Fourth Amendment, having a New York state license plate simply does not, and cannot, constitute ‘probable cause’ to allow police to stop a car and interrogate the driver, no matter how laudable the goal of the stop may be.”