California officials say they’re planning to share DMV data with a private third party in order to comply with the 2005 Real ID Act. The federal law was a way to establish better identification standards across states, after 9/11.
Yasmin Martinez is an organizer with Bay Resistance. She says the plan will make it easier to target California’s immigrant population.
“If California gives this information and the feds access to home addresses and immigration status, that information would put thousands and thousand of people at risk for more targeted enforcement,” Martinez told the crowd.
Advocates also point out that sharing driver’s data violates AB 60 — or The Safe and Responsible Drive Act — which went into effect in 2015. AB 60 allows all Californians to apply for a driver’s license, regardless of immigration status.
State officials say they’re worried that if California doesn’t share the data, then California drivers licenses will no longer be accepted at airports. But Edward Hasbrouck, with the Identity Project, says that California doesn’t have to comply.
“The state of California has led the pushback against the DHS on a number of other areas of lawless DHS threats," Hasbrouck pointed out. "This could be one of those things too.”
The driver's license information will be shared with the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators or AMVA — a nonprofit trade association whose board is made up of DMV officials from across the country. Hasbrouck says California won’t have any control over what the federal government does with the DMV’s data once it’s uploaded to AMVA’s database.
Arne Johnson is with Rainbow Families Action, a Bay Area coalition of parents of trans kids. Johnson says the plan puts trans people at risk too.
“Many of us are getting ready to teach our kids to drive," Johnson told KALW. "And we're having to confront whether or not doing this very American rite of passage is something that will endanger our children beyond what we already know is unsafe about the roads.”
Johnson’s kids are 14 and 15.
“We were talking about doing it this summer, and this news has been hard to imagine whether I would want them to have a driver's license at all.”
Sharing the data will cost the state $55 million. The California Legislature still hasn’t approved that funding. Advocates from Bay Resistance and Rainbow Families Action are calling on state representatives to push back against the plan.
Governor Newsom’s office did not respond in time to KALW’s request for comment.
