Drive for assurance

Those in US illegally push for licenses

Associated Press

ALBION, N.Y.

Dairy farm worker Luis Jimenez gambles every time he drives without a license. Even a minor traffic stop could alert immigration agents that he is in the country illegally and lead to deportation.

But in the wide-open spaces of upstate New York’s farm country, supermarkets and job sites are often too far away for walking, there’s not always somebody around to provide a ride, and catching a city bus or subway just isn’t an option.

“Necessity forces us to take a risk,” Jimenez said in Spanish as he drove home recently. “We have to work; we have to buy food. Sometimes we get sick, and workers like me can’t drive to a hospital, can’t buy medicine. But I feel I need to take the risk so that my kids and my family can have a better life.”

In New York and elsewhere, the idea of extending new privileges to those without legal immigration status has been resisted. But a renewed push across the country to allow them to get driver’s licenses resonates strongly among those who make their living in the rural crop fields, dairy farms and fruit orchards where the need for everyday transportation can be the greatest.

Apple orchard worker Eladio Beltran, who is facing deportation after a traffic stop, says licenses also could alleviate the constant fear workers like him live under.

“We don’t feel safe,” Beltran said. “If you are in a vehicle and you see a cop, you know any time he can turn his lights on. And you end up arrested; you end up in Mexico.”

Immigrants and their advocates have already gotten access to such licenses in a dozen states, including California, Colorado and Illinois, some of them accepting state tax returns as identification. They are now targeting roughly a half-dozen states where they see a friendlier political landscape this year. They include Wisconsin and New Jersey, where Democratic governors succeeded Republicans, and New York, where Democrats now are in total control of the Legislature.

“Now there’s a new urgency to really try to get this done, and there is new political opportunity,” said Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera, an immigrant advocacy group based in Milwaukee.

The laws could give state-level protection to immigrants who fear more aggressive enforcement by federal immigration agents under the Trump administration. Bolstering those fears is the impending departure, announced over the weekend, of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who had been viewed as resistant to some of the harshest immigration measures supported by Trump and his aides.