Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo has backed down from restricting New Yorkers' access to her state, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Sunday afternoon.
Raimondo announced on Friday that her state’s police would pull over drivers with New York license plates and force them to self-quarantine for 14 days. Cuomo quickly denounced the policy and threatened to sue.
During his daily briefing on Sunday, Cuomo said he had spoken with Raimondo on Saturday and that she told him her executive order was being repealed.
“I don’t think the order was called for, I don’t believe it was legal, I don’t believe it was neighborly,” he said. “I understand the point, but I thought there were different ways to do it, and the governor of Rhode Island was every receptive.”
New Yorkers also have been subjected to travel restrictions from Florida. Gov. Ron DeSantis has said that people arriving from New York need to quarantine, and on Saturday, he announced he’d be setting up a checkpoint on I-95 to keep New Yorkers from entering the state by car.
Cuomo said he was unaware of the checkpoint.
“I don’t know what Florida did, but I will look into it," he said.
The governor had no criticism of President Donald Trump’s decision to subject New York to a travel advisory rather than a “quarantine,” a decision the president announced on Saturday night.
“This is not a lockdown, it is a travel advisory to be implemented by the states, in essence,” Cuomo said. “It’s nothing that we haven’t been doing — nonessential people should stay at home, so it’s totally consistent with everything we’ve been doing.
So I support what the president did, because it affirms what we have been doing.”