Illegal Immigrants

More Than a Million Undocumented Immigrants Gained Driver’s Licenses in California

January 29, 2023 By Wendy Fry 6 Comments

On a recent night, by the Miramar Reservoir in San Diego County, a man named Erwin sat at a picnic table scrolling through dozens of texts from his wife. He read aloud her warnings about police patrolling a road near their home.

“‘There’s a lot of cops out tonight,’” he read. “Cops everywhere.’ ‘Be careful; lots of cops.’ ‘Too many cops.’

“Every time I want to get a burger or juice or anything like that and I leave the house, she will text me ‘There’s a lot of cops. Be careful,’” Erwin explained. “It’s a reality that we live in. We adapt our life and our every day to it.”

Erwin, who asked not to use his last name for fear of deportation, is a 27-year old business manager, husband and father of a 6-month-old baby girl. He’s also a Congolese immigrant whose visa expired. His wife, a U.S. citizen, fears what would happen if police stop him.

Although California is a sanctuary state — with protections for immigrants who lack documentation authorizing them to be in the United States — there are loopholes and law enforcement sometimes works with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Beyond that, Erwin worries a traffic stop might escalate. “Believe me, in my country, I would never have to worry about getting pulled over and being scared that they’re going to shoot me,” he said.

Erwin wants to swap his foreign driver’s license for a California one.

“Before I didn’t have a family, so I could risk it,” he said, “but now I have my family and I drive my kid everywhere we go. So I decided to get right and get the driver’s license, so it’s less of an issue if I get pulled over.”

A license to drive

Erwin has made multiple attempts to obtain an AB 60 driver’s license. It’s a special license that lets undocumented California residents legally drive, but with federal limitations.

Proponents say the special license was a boon to immigrants and the state’s economy. But critics, and even some immigrant advocates, say it has drawbacks and risks, since law enforcement and immigration officials can access it. Nevertheless the state is expanding its flexibility, giving IDs to more undocumented residents.

California lawmakers first passed AB 60, called the Safe and Responsible Drivers Act, in 2013, as part of a broad effort to adopt more inclusive policies toward immigrants, to decriminalize their daily lives and maximize their contributions to the economy, experts said.

Since the law took effect in 2015, more than a million undocumented immigrants, out of an estimated 2 million, have received licenses, and more than 700,000 have renewed them.

Besides California, 18 other states have followed suit.

“With AB 60, what we did was recognize the needs of many hard-working immigrants living here and contributing so much to our great state,” said Luis Alejo, the former Assembly member from Watsonville who authored the bill. Now he is a county supervisor for Monterey County.

Undocumented immigrants in California contribute $3.1 billion a year in state and local taxes; nationally they contribute $11.7 billion in taxes, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a Washington D.C. research entity.

New legislation signed in September will make other California ID’s available in January to undocumented immigrants who don’t drive or who can’t take the driver’s test. Backers of that measure say residents most likely to benefit are the elderly and people with disabilities.

“IDs are needed for so many aspects of everyday life, from accessing critical health benefits, to renting an apartment,” said Shiu-Ming Cheer, deputy director of programs and campaigns at the California Immigrant Policy Center, a sponsor of the law.

Experts say more flexible ID laws may do more than help people on an individual level. Eric Figueroa, a senior manager at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said licenses enable undocumented immigrants to look for better jobs and gain better protections from employers trying to steal or withhold wages.

“It helps build the economy broadly — by unlocking people’s potential — and it helps the workers by giving them more options,” he said.

Erwin uses family connections to remotely renew his Congo license — a privilege he noted not everyone has. Being able to drive allowed his family to move to a better neighborhood and him to find better employment in a suburb about 25 miles away, he said.

No one has studied how many people have garnered better jobs as a result of the special licenses. Alejo said many of his constituents describe “profound economic impacts,” but he agrees more research is needed.

Some opponents of the licenses say their economic benefits are likely negligible. Instead it is encouraging illegal migration to California, they say, which further strains the state’s budget to provide education and other services.

More than that, it makes undocumented residents too comfortable, critics argued.

Before the special licenses, immigrants said they feared routine traffic stops and drunk-driving checkpoints, where their vehicles could be impounded for not having a driver’s license. Many also could face deportation proceedings after being contacted by police.

“Community members used to share that they always used to have to buy beat-up cars because they always knew it would get impounded,” said Erin Tsurumoto Grassi, policy director at Alliance San Diego, a community organization focused on equity issues.

“Folks were always losing their vehicles because they didn’t have a license. They didn’t have the ability to have a license,” she said.

Accident trends

Some opponents of the special license law claimed it would make roadways less safe, because some immigrant drivers wouldn’t be able to read traffic signs in English.

But a 2017 study by the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford University showed those safety concerns were speculative. The rate of total accidents, including fatal accidents, did not rise and the rate of hit-and-run accidents declined, which likely improved traffic safety and reduced overall costs for California drivers, researchers said.

The study, which documented a 10% decline in hit-and-run accidents, ran in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in April 2017.

“Coming to this as scientists, we were immediately shocked by the absence of facts in this debate,” said Jens Hainmueller, a Stanford political science professor and co-director of the lab. “Nobody was drawing on any evidence; it was more characterized by ideology.”

Other research by Hans Lueders, a postdoctoral research associate for the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice at Princeton University, found AB 60 did not improve insurance premiums nor increase the share of uninsured drivers.

Are license holders safe?

Questions persist about whether the special licenses make recipients easier targets for immigration enforcement.

Some immigrant advocates initially opposed the new licenses because they looked different from other driver’s licenses. On the front of the cards’ upper right side is “Federal Limits Apply” instead of the iconic gold bear of California. On the back the cards say: “This card is not acceptable for official federal purposes.”

Alejo said legislators had intended to protect people from immigration enforcement, so they wrote certain protective measures into the original AB 60 bill. They added language prohibiting state and local government agencies from using the special license to discriminate against license holders or for immigration enforcement.

Yet some advocates point to reports of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement accessing the databases of state and local law enforcement agencies and of state departments of motor vehicles.

In December 2018, the ACLU of Northern California and the National Immigration Law Center published a report detailing multiple ways federal immigration agencies get access to motor vehicle records. After that, the California Attorney General’s Office implemented new protocols to protect immigrants’ DMV information from ICE and other agencies.

A chilling effect

Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said there is always going to be a risk someone will misuse data on undocumented people.

“I wouldn’t say that people should feel 100% safe,” he said.” I would just say that the risk has been lessened quite a bit … but that does not mean the risk has totally gone away.”

In recent years there has been a large drop-off in the number of immigrants applying for AB 60 licenses. According to the Department of Motor Vehicles, 396,859 immigrants applied for the licenses in fiscal 2014-15, but only 68,426 applied in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2022.

Advocates said that may be because most people who wanted a license applied for it already, or because education and outreach about the law have lessened over the years.

Cheer said news of ICE accessing California databases could have a chilling effect on immigrants’ willingness to interact with government.

“It does create more of a trust deficit with government agencies whenever there is a story about ICE having access to California databases or information in California databases,” she said.

Being seen

On the other hand, there’s an added benefit to the new licenses, Cheer said: immigrants now have a feeling of being included and acknowledged as residents of California.

“I feel like that’s a very important psychological piece, in the sense of ‘This is who I am. I have an ID to show you who I am,’” she said.

Erwin said he carefully weighed the possibility that he would be effectively giving ICE his home address against wanting to have the proper paperwork, so there would be no excuse for a police officer to escalate a traffic stop with him. He decided one risk was worth reducing the risk of the other.

For some immigrants, the passage of the license law didn’t come soon enough.

Dulce Garcia, an attorney and advocate for immigrants, recently described at a San Diego public forum on immigration enforcement what happened when police stopped her brother who was undocumented.

Police cited Edgar Saul Garcia Cardoso for driving without a license and when he appeared in a courthouse in January 2020 to face the consequences, ICE detained and deported him, within hours, to Tijuana, she said.

There he was kidnapped, held for ransom and tortured for eight months, Garcia said.

Click here to read the full article at CalMatters

Filed Under: Trending News Tagged With: California DMV, Illegal Immigrants, Legislature

Could Undocumented Residents Soon Vote in Santa Ana?

July 27, 2022 By Brandon Pho 2 Comments

While undocumented immigrants remain barred from voting in federal elections, Santa Ana could join other parts of the U.S. that have in recent years allowed noncitizen voting at the local level.

As they debated city charter amendments at their July 19 meeting, most City Council members indicated support for a ballot measure opening local elections up to more people living in Santa Ana but born outside the U.S.

If passed by voters, Santa Ana would join a list of cities across the country – from as large as San Francisco and New York City (where a judge recently struck down the law) to even smaller towns like Montpelier and Winooski in Vermont – that have pushed for such expansions of civic participation to residents without citizenship status.

“These are people who pay taxes. These are people who live in our community,” said Councilmember Johnathan Ryan Hernandez, who proposed the new idea in the middle of an existing discussion on city policy revisions that would need to go before voters in November.

More than 82,000 undocumented people are believed to live in Santa Ana, according to American Community Survey estimates from 2020. More than 60,000 residents in town were born outside the U.S. but have naturalized, according to the same set of estimates.

“I would like to see us include language that would allow voters to decide if residents who are non-citizens should be able to vote in our elections,” Hernandez said at last Tuesday’s meeting.

The idea got traction among most of his colleagues, for staff to come back with a recommendation at a future meeting, including Mayor Vicente Sarmiento, who noted from the dais that, at least in spirit, the idea “already (has) precedent” in town.

Specifically, the majority Latino city allows undocumented residents to sit on city boards and commissions – a policy change made officially in March last year.

In Santa Ana, Sarmiento said, people of undocumented status – who tend to confront some of the city’s most pressing quality of life issues – “sometimes are more vested” in city affairs “than voting members.”

“We have other cities that have done this and this can be legally upheld,” Sarmiento said, expressing the need for “a bit more robust explanation for it.”

The idea would have to come back to council members some time before the Aug. 12 filing deadline for city ballot measures. The City Council’s last regularly-scheduled meeting before then is Aug. 2.

Council members Sarmiento, Hernandez, Thai Viet Phan, Jessie Lopez and Nelida Mendoza supported the idea that evening.

But two did not: Phil Bacerra – who at last Tuesday’s meeting said he didn’t support approving something proposed on the spot – and David Penaloza.

Both council members tend to disagree with the ideas pushed by an opposing political camp on the dais, under Sarmiento. And the proposal by Hernandez, who’s frequently aligned with Sarmiento on certain issues, came during what was already a contentious debate that night about the existing, proposed city policy revisions before them.

Aside from that, Penaloza said in a Friday phone interview, “I’m not supportive of it coming as a charter amendment this election cycle, mainly because these are the midterms.”

Penaloza argued the idea’s approval would hinge on what’s generally a smaller midterm election voter turnout compared to presidential election years.

But Penaloza said “it’s a valid discussion to have” and that he does see “a benefit to increasing the democratic process for a huge area of our community.”

“But how do we make sure it’s feasible?” Penaloza said, arguing the city could step into legal mud.

Namely, Penaloza invoked the stricken law in New York, where a state supreme court judge from Staten Island said it ran afoul of the New York state constitution, according to the New York Times, which applies voting eligibility to citizens meeting adult age and residency requirements.

A legal expert interviewed by the Times, as well as proponents of the law, argued the New York constitution’s language didn’t translate to an express exclusion of noncitizens who meet the age and residency requirements.

Click here to read the full article in the Voice of OC

Filed Under: Trending News Tagged With: elections, Illegal Immigrants, Santa Ana

Guess who pays if Obama’s plan to defer deportations is upheld

February 10, 2016 By Susan Shelley 2 Comments

By the end of June, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether President Obama really has the power to defer the deportation of 4 million people who are in the United States illegally.

The justices have agreed to hear the case of United States v. Texas, in which 26 states are suing the federal government to stop the president’s deferral policy from going forward.

The first issue to be decided is whether the states have “standing” to sue. They’ll have to show that they are harmed by the president’s actions.

Former California Gov. Pete Wilson says there’s no doubt about it.

“The states continue to feel the heavy impacts and the very high costs of federal failure to deal rationally and adequately with immigration policy,” Wilson told a meeting of the Federalist Society recently at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley.

In 1994, Wilson said, California spent “more than $3 billion, or 7 percent of the entire state operating budget” to provide health care and education to illegal immigrants and to incarcerate alien felons.

Wilson unsuccessfully sued the federal government to recover the costs that state taxpayers were bearing. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected all his arguments, even the claim that the federal government ought to pay the costs of incarcerating criminals who should have been stopped at the border.

The court said, “California can simply exercise discretion not to prosecute and imprison alien felons and thus not incur the expense,” Wilson recalled sardonically.

No discretion is allowed in education. In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled in Plyler v. Doe that states must provide free public education to all children, regardless of immigration status.

Wilson said one reason he backed Proposition 187 — the 1994 ballot measure that prohibited state funding of public benefits for undocumented California residents — was that he wanted to challenge the Plyler ruling.

“I was convinced that if we could get 187 before a notably less liberal Supreme Court a decade later, there was a good chance that the court would overturn Plyler,” Wilson said, describing it as a “weak” 5-4 decision. But because of a long delay in the lower court, time ran out for Wilson, and his successor, Gov. Gray Davis, dropped the appeal.

“The people of California were cheated of their day in the Supreme Court,” Wilson said.

Today, the cost of illegal immigration is embedded in state and local budgets.

In 2014, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a $61 million program called My Health L.A. to provide free medical care to undocumented immigrants ineligible for Obamacare.

California’s new system of distributing education money, the Local Control Funding Formula, gives more money to districts with high concentrations of students classified as “English learners.” The LCFF replaced a system that provided “categorical funding” for specific programs, including the arts and music block grant, gifted and talented education, and the school safety block grant.

Californians will pay $132 million a year for a new state law that provides free health coverage to undocumented residents under the age of 19.

And if Obama prevails in the Supreme Court, California may feel it in the Medi-Cal program, which already serves 13.5 million people. The state has considered deferred immigration status to be a category eligible for full Medi-Cal coverage.

However, the outcome of this case is completely unpredictable. What happens if the court upholds the president’s use of executive orders to change immigration policy, and Donald Trump is elected president?

Maybe the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to the law of unintended consequences.

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Donald Trump, Gray Davis, Health care, Illegal Immigrants, Immigration, Pete Wilson, Plyler v. Doe, Prop. 187

Half-Million Driver’s Licenses Granted to Illegal Immigrants

January 18, 2016 By James Poulos 11 Comments

Roiled by immigration fears on both sides, California supplied drivers licenses to big numbers of the otherwise undocumented, further sharpening the statewide debate.

“California issued more than a half-million driver’s licenses under a new law granting the identifying documents to immigrants who may be in the country illegally,” the Associated Press noted. “The Department of Motor Vehicles announced Wednesday that 605,000 licenses were issued since AB60 took effect last January. That’s out of 830,000 applications.”

The Orange County Registerreported that reaching and processing that group would cost an estimated $141 million spread over three years. “Seniors were particularly hard hit because anyone over 70 has to appear in person at a DMV office to have a license renewed,” according to the Register. But 76-year-old Kent Moore told the Register that he had “mixed feelings” about spending hours at the Costa Mesa DMV despite holding an appointment. “These folks have jobs. And they support families. If they go through the credential process, they shouldn’t be denied,” he said. “But I paid my dues. I’ve been a model citizen. I don’t feel I should have to wait in line for hours, behind newly arrived people who are here illegally.”

No residency permits

Although opposition to the licensing plan has been steady, it has not produced a groundswell strong enough to roll back the problem. But a proposed initiative that would have ushered in a residence permit system for those who unlawfully entered and remained in the state failed to collect enough signatures to meet the requirements for inclusion on the ballot this election year. The so-called California Immigration Reform Act “would also have created a new state department to administer the permit system, require permit holders to pay state income taxes and make permit holders eligible for certain public benefits,” MyNewsLA noted. “The initiative would also have prohibited state and local governments from using public funds to support or otherwise participate in federal immigration enforcement against permit holders.”

Immigration has remained a sharply divisive issue, with state officials seeking to pursue an accommodating course while many residents remain on edge. Late last month, the Golden State was virtually alone in responding favorably to the federal government’s request for help in housing immigrant children on their own. “California and Virginia told the National Guard Bureau they have facilities that could be used but they would require additional funding if asked to meet federal requirements,”according to the Associated Press. California Guard spokesman Brandon Honig told the AP that “all state facilities would require work for fencing or other items to meet the requirements.”

Raid fears

But this month, passions have run high amid a spate of federal immigration raids both real and imagined. In events that sent tremors through California politics, “Democrats, led by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, have protested a number of raids carried out in southern states by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers against illegal immigrants from Central America — 121 adults and children who had been ordered to leave the country by a judge,” ABC News reported. “Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-California, who has been in constant communication with White House officials and attended the Tuesday meeting with the White House council, said she was not aware of any imminent ‘pause’ to the operations.” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., had predicted a reprieve, although he couldn’t speak to when the White House might announce it, according to The Hill.

Rumors quickly caught fire in California that deportation raids were underway on the west coast too. As Fusion noted, “there were multiple reports of immigration officials lingering in front of a San Francisco elementary school. Tweets, Facebook updates, and even Instagram posts reported immigration checkpoints at grocery stores all over the Bay Area. There were also reports of immigration agents rounding up day laborers at a Home Depot in Hayward. But all of the reports turned out to be false, according to immigration officials and other social media users who went looking for the raids with the intent to share pictures and video.”

Originally published by CalWatchdog.com

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: DMV, Illegal Immigrants, Immigration

79,000 CA Driver’s Licenses Issued to Illegal Immigrants … So Far

February 19, 2015 By Beth Baumann 8 Comments

Move out of the way, Californians. Illegal aliens are in the building … literally.

Now that DMV – everyone’s favorite destination – is giving illegal aliens driver’s licenses, new offices are being opened around the state, more employees are being hired and office hours are being extended.

According to the Orange County Register, “DMV has issued 79,000 new driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants and administered approximately 523,000 written and behind-the-wheel exams” since the law took effect on January 2^nd.

I’m not sure what’s more ludicrous – giving illegal aliens driver’s licenses or using our tax dollars to provide them with this luxury. While most people say they want illegal aliens to have driver’s licenses, they forget a few major points:

Number one: Why are we providing someone the ability to drive in our country when they aren’t allowed to be here in the first place? Wouldn’t it make more sense to deport them? If they break the law before they’re a United States citizen, how do we know they won’t break the law if and when they’re a legal citizen?

Number two: It’s not fair to reward those who break the law. What about the people who have waited years to come to our country? They’re being penalized for following the proper protocol.

Number three: My mom was involved in an accident with an illegal alien. He had no license, no insurance and was let off scot-free. I wrote about the experience extensively. Unfortunately, Americans are left with the aftermath while an illegal alien is able to move on with their lives.

Giving driver’s licenses to illegal aliens does nothing but place an even greater burden on our system. Those of us who pay into the tax system are seeing our tax dollars used to extend the DMV, one of the biggest government bureaucracies, for the benefit of those who don’t contribute via taxes.

Instead of literally throwing money down the drain, our nation needs to address the immigration system as a whole. Some states, like California, who are giving illegal aliens driver’s licenses, are asking for a wave of illegals to flock to the state for this benefit.

Not only is this an immigration issue, but it’s also an economic issue. Bringing low-skilled labor to the market is not what California needs. We need high-skilled, highly valuable workers who will raise wages, not lower them.

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Beth Baumann, DMV, Illegal Immigrants, Immigration

DMV Jammed — Illegal Immigrants to Blame?

February 6, 2015 By Paul Harfield 2 Comments

Have you tried to schedule an appointment for a license renewal lately?

I received a renewal reminder in mid-January. The expiration of my license is March 18th.

Within a week after receiving it, I attempted to schedule an appointment at the DMV. I tried several offices in the area – the earliest appointments were in early to mid-April. Does me a lot of good.

I called Assemblyman Adrin Nazarian’s office for assistance. The field rep confirmed my suspicion that the lack of timely appointments was due to the surge of applicants caused by the passage of AB60, the bill authorizing the licensing of illegal immigrants.

Put aside the divisive politics for a moment. When the legislature passes a bill that creates a reasonably predictable response – and certainly anyone in Sacramento could have figured AB60 would send people flocking to the DMV – would it not make sense to staff offices accordingly, even extend hours into the evening?

Better yet, why not grant automatic 30-day extensions to those of us with the misfortune to have their renewals fall in this timeframe?

I suggested that to Nazarian’s field representative. He doubted anything could be done.

“Why not executive action,” I asked. Once again, he could not see that happening.

I guess Governor Brown is too preoccupied with laying track for HSR.

The rep did say he would pass along my suggestion to the assembly member.

My next stop – State Senator Hertzberg.

I will keep you posted.

(Paul Hatfield is a CPA and former NC Valley Village board member and treasurer. He blogs at Village to Village and contributes to CityWatch. He can be reached at: phinnoho@aol.com)

Originally posted on CityWatchLA.com

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: AB60, Adrin Nazarian, DMV, Illegal Immigrants, Immigration