Immigrant advocacy groups gathered outside Los Angeles City Hall Friday to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the signing of a state bill allowing undocumented migrants to get a driver’s license.
An estimated 1 million California resident previously ineligible to get a driver’s license may apply to the Department of Motor Vehicles for the document under AB 60, which goes into effect Jan. 1. Gov. Jerry Brown signed the bill into law last year at a desk placed outside Los Angeles City Hall.
“Today, we’re here because no force of nature … can stop an idea whose time has come,” said Los Angeles City Councilman Gil Cedillo, who as a state Assemblyman initiated the effort to overturn a 1994 law preventing many immigrants in California from obtaining driver’s licenses.
Cedillo said many immigrants are counting the days as “we get closer and closer to the reality of Jan. 1.”
The ban on issuing licenses to people lacking legal immigration status grew out of “xenophobia and anti-immigrant hysteria,” he said, and made the streets more dangerous, because “at least 10 percent of the people on the road were not going to be licensed, were not going to be insured.”
Immigrants without legal status also face having their cars impounded, said Jose Diaz of the Pomona Economic Opportunity Center, which offers services to day laborers. In his community, Diaz said, “police continue to harass folks who are undocumented by taking their cars away.” The passage of AB 60 “is an opportunity to keep that from happening.”
Representatives of the advocacy groups, which include the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, reminded immigrants they should begin gathering documentation for the license application process, and to watch out for scams by people who say they can expedite or process. The only agency that can receive money for licenses is the DMV, they said.
The groups also are urging the federal government to keep confidential the information provided by immigrants to the state driver’s licensing agency.
The federal government recently approved the design of the AB 60 driver’s licenses that reads “federal limits apply” on the front.
—Staff and Wire Reports