Connecticut State Attorney General William Tong is taking on a national leadership role. The second-term Democrat has been elected president of the National Association of Attorneys General. The vote was unanimous, and it comes at a time when states are preparing for the return of President-elect Trump to the White House. Tong spoke with WAMC's Ian Pickus about the new position and how his office is readying for the new era in Washington.
There are obviously 50 different states and different views and priorities among the states. So what will your role be in leading this association?
So my role is to hold us all together. We do so much work together, Democrats and Republicans, big states and small, North and South. I just left our annual meeting in Washington, DC, where my colleagues on both sides of the aisle elected me as president-elect. That means I'll be president not in ’25 but in ’26. and a Republican, John Formella, will be president now, this next year. And it's because we have so much work together on the social media crisis, on the opioid and addiction crisis, so much work that we're still doing together. That's why it's so important that we stay together. We cannot do this work divided. We can only do it together as a united community.
The role of Attorney General, which, of course, is a political position, does it stand aside from kind of the day to day politics that we all just went through in November to a degree?
Yeah, to a degree. In many ways, it's the last corner of public life, the last public institution and legislative body. You know, we sort of function like a super legislature. It's the last corner of public life in which Democrats and Republicans work together fairly seamlessly. That doesn't mean politics doesn't intrude upon our room and our work. It does. It would be naïve and not true to say that it doesn't, and it has impacted us in negative ways over the last few years. But I think by and large, we're still very much engaged. The states still do a lot together. I was just talking with my Republican colleagues, for example, yesterday from Kansas, from South Dakota, from Tennessee, Indiana. We do a lot on robocalls, for example, with Indiana on robocall scammers and Todd Rokita and I, you know, politically, are very different. We don't agree on much, but we agree on protecting people in our states from robocalls and from scammers.
So you were quoted the other day saying that you'll be going on the offense with respect to the issue of reproductive rights. What specifically do you have in mind?
So we went on offense in the fight to preserve mifepristone, and we're gonna stay on offense to protect access to mifepristone. There was an attack on mifepristone in Texas in the Fifth Circuit, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. So we went and filed our own lawsuit on offense in federal court in Washington State to preserve access to mifepristone, here in Connecticut and in 17 other states. Mifepristone, as many people now know, is one half of the medication that you take for a medication abortion, which represent one half of all abortions in this country.
What are your office’s plans to respond to President-elect Trump's promised immigration roundups and crackdowns in the new year?
Look, it's the policy of the state of Connecticut to respect and honor and protect immigrants and immigrant families. The immigrant families and immigrants play such a huge role in Connecticut's economy, in our schools, in our public institutions, you know, in our communities, and my family is one of them. My parents were immigrants. I was born the first American in my family with birthright citizenship, and our story is unremarkable because so many other people share it, and so Connecticut can't live without immigrants and immigrant workers, neither can the rest of the country. Half of all farm and meatpacking workers in this country, 50% are immigrants and undocumented. So that doesn't mean that we don't enforce the law. We do. And it doesn't mean that we don't need a sensible way for people to pursue lawful status and to become citizens. We need that too, but Washington has failed to act. They've been unable to get out of their own way and pass sensible immigration reform. So until then, we're going to do what's best for Connecticut, and we're going to make sure that we protect people that are vital to our economy and to our institutions and to our communities.
Do you think the state will be able to resist such a sweeping change in federal policy? I mean, some of the things that are being discussed now include breaking up families and sending ICE into places where they usually would not have conducted such raids and that kind of thing.
Look, we're going to follow the law, and the federal government has broad authority in in the area of immigration, that's a fact. And if you commit a violent crime, rape, murder, a Class A or B felony in Connecticut, we're gonna investigate and prosecute and incarcerate you, and if appropriate, you'll get deported. But we're not talking about those people. We're talking about families. We're talking about people that are vital to our small businesses. You know, I tell people, this is going to get real when your fifth-grader comes home and says that their friend, their best friend lost their parents, not because they were killed or got in a car accident, but because they got picked up and they're now being detained, and now this fifth-grader has no family and no parents to care for them. That's when this is going to get real, and that's what I'm concerned about.
Are there other areas where you expect Connecticut and other Northeast typically blue states like New York and Massachusetts to work together against some of what President-elect Trump has promised to do?
We're going to work together to protect our states. So another area, for example, is in the area of environmental protection. You know, under future and former president’s first administration, Trump 1.0, you know, they did a lot of damage to the Environmental Protection Agency and hollowing out that that really important arm of the federal government, particularly our ability to protect Connecticut and its clean air. Connecticut's air is not nearly as clean as it should be, because states upwind of us, like Ohio, shoot coal related emissions into the air, and they blow downwind into Connecticut.
What the EPA used to do is it promulgated rules that said that that Ohio, you've got to manage those emissions and not blow so much particulate and toxins into the air that they blow downwind into Connecticut and they hurt people in Connecticut. But the EPA, because it's been weakened and debilitated, is unable to perform that function, or unwilling to perform that function. And I'm really worried that an EPA under this president will continue that dereliction of its duty to keep our air safe. So sure we're going to fight for Connecticut and Massachusetts is gonna fight for Massachusetts. This really isn't about him, you know, it's about us. It's about our states. It's about the people that live in our states, and if people are being harmed and impacted in Connecticut, I don't care who the president is, I'm going to take action and I'm going to sue.
You know, both President Biden and President Trump have recently raised concerns about what they label the politicization of the criminal justice system. How do you maintain public trust in an office like yours when comments about that and the U.S. Justice Department are becoming so frequent?
We do our jobs and we follow the law and we enforce the law fairly, evenhandedly, and we do that every single day. I don't think any reasonable person in Connecticut thinks that we don't do our jobs and honor our oath faithfully, and that we do our very best to do the thing we're supposed to do every single day, and that's protect the people of our state and protect Connecticut families.
