The Mayor’s Deputy Director of Policy, Leonela Felix

In only five years, RIC alumna Leonela Felix vaulted from the halls of Rhode Island College ​to City Hall, as the new deputy director of policy for Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza. 

After earning dual degrees in justice studies and sociology at RIC in 2013, Felix went on to earn her law degree at the New England School of Law | Boston in 2018. Though she recently took the bar, Felix said her end goal is not to practice law.

“As a lawyer, I can change the lives of individual clients, but if I can change the policies that led them to need a lawyer in the first place, that’s even better,” she said. “I want to do policy work where I have the maximum impact on my community, particularly around immigration.”

Felix defined a policy maker as “one who puts into place procedures that need to happen in order for change to move forward.” Among her duties is oversight of the mayor’s strategic plan for housing, youth and education, and immigration; and she comes with not only a rich background in immigration law but an ironclad commitment to immigration. 

While attending law school in the part-time evening program, Felix was a full-time immigration paralegal for the Law Offices of Rachel L. Rado. As the only paralegal in an office of four attorneys, she conducted extensive interviews with clients seeking naturalization, asylum, or other forms of relief. This involved long, emotionally exhausting hours, she said, because in telling their stories, the clients were reliving the trauma. “You have to tread carefully,” she said. To be an immigration paralegal is a heavy lift emotionally when one is committed to the work, she said.

After translating the affidavit from Spanish to English and interviewing anyone who was able to substantiate the client’s claim, Felix then spent endless hours poring through supporting documentation – birth certificates, medical records, etc., translating them into English. She then filed the claim in court and created a file on the client for the attorney. As a rule, she said, paralegals tend to know each case better than the attorneys because they’ve spent so much time on it.

Though the emotional stress was great and the issues complex, Felix’s commitment to “fixing immigration” has been unwavering. In her final year of law school, she was hired as policy director for Progreso Latino, Inc., the flagship organization for Latinos and immigrants throughout the state, providing social services as well as legal services for immigration and naturalization applicants. 

Felix created Progreso’s policy department, providing research, recommendations and testimony at hearings at the Rhode Island State House. “I supported every bill on immigration and opposed everything that was harmful to community members,” she said. 

Felix coordinated community conversations within the immigrant and Latino communities in the Blackstone Valley area around legislation that could affect them, and she created and facilitated youth and adult civic engagement. 

She related the story of one of the strongest anti-immigration advocates in the state of Rhode Island, who attends every hearing that may directly or indirectly affect the immigrant community. 

“One day I sat down with him in one of the Senate rooms in the State House and had a conversation with him,” she said. “I told him I am a U.S. citizen, born in Boston and raised in Rhode Island and in the Dominican Republic. I said to him, ‘Sir, do you know how long it would take me, a U.S. citizen, to petition for my brother, a Dominican native, to come here?’ He said, ‘No. How long?’ I said, ‘It would take up to 12 years, if not more. But there’s a catch. If he reaches age 21 before my application is finally adjudicated the application may be denied at the discretion of the interviewer.’ The man replied, ‘Well, that’s not fair.’ And I said to him, ‘No. It’s not fair, but that’s legal immigration in this country.”

“That conversation transpired between the time it took to walk from the Senate room to the elevator. It took that brief amount of time for him to realize that what he had just been advocating for was something that he considered to be unfair,” she said. 

“My vision is for people to come together and have an informed conversation. It’s okay to disagree. And I understand that for some people it doesn’t matter if they have all the facts in front of them, they will still see things in a certain way. But I do want them to understand why a man decided to travel thousands of miles from Central America with a toddler, with little food or water, risking his life and the life of his child to cross the border into the United States. People don’t do that because they want to see the Statue of Liberty. They’re doing that because $7 a day is not enough to feed a family of four. We need to be fully informed,” she said, “and that’s never going to happen if I, as a liberal, only choose to listen to NPR, and you, as a conservative, only choose to listen to Fox News.”

Felix is also calling for more inclusiveness. Working for Progreso Latino, she often frequented the State House advocating for the agency’s legislative priorities, and she would note the racial disparities among the state’s legislators. 

“Based on 2016-2017 data,” she said, “only four percent of our Rhode Island legislators are people of color, yet the highest demographic in the city’s capital are people of color. The people who represent us are not representative of us.”

Felix believes an entire culture change is required. “We need to be intentional about our decision to be more inclusive. Being intentional means recognizing not only that change is warranted but making an executive decision to hire top-level people of color. It brings a richer understanding around critical issues and much needed change,” she said.

If Elorza is reelected, Felix intends to continue her policy work and, in the long term, create a nonprofit of her own around immigration.​

Click below to read other articles in this series:

​Miriam Contreras Morales: The Heart of an Activist​ 

​Criminal Defense Attorney Allyson Quay: Fighting Injustice from the Inside​

​​Attorney Katelyn Medeiros: ​Defending the Rights of Children