CA to share driver’s license details despite immigration fears

from Harry Johnson, Wendy Fry and Yue Stella YuCalMatters

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

The Department of Motor Vehicles is about to share driver’s license and identification data with an outside network despite concerns from immigrant advocates that the information could expose people to deportation.

The California Legislature authorized this sharing in the state budget, which was adopted on Mondaytogether with a separate transport measure that sets out some special supervisory procedures for data protection.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the budget and is expected to approve the companion measure his administration negotiated with lawmakers.

Lawmakers previously had refused to approve the data sharing plan while the defenses were put in place end of last week.

The stakes are high for the more than 1 million immigrants who have driver’s licenses. The system records the last five digits of the driver’s social security number and uses the placeholder “99999” for people without one. Advocates worry that submitting that information to a national database could expose undocumented Californians to federal immigration authorities, and told CalMatters in April that such a plan amounts to “betrayal.”

Earlier this year, the governor’s office told CalMatters that reporting the dispute amounted to “creating fear and panic with lies.”

The new state budget includes $55 million that the DMV will use to enable the sharing of California records with the Interstate Inspection Service and the SPEX database managed by the nonprofit American Motor Vehicle Administrators Association (AAMVA).

State officials say the data sharing is necessary to comply with the federal REAL ID Act, warning that if California doesn’t participate, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security could refuse to accept government IDs at airports. They say the system can only be queried for one record at a time using information provided by an applicant, and that bulk searches are not possible.

The new legislation includes additional measures to protect immigrants from abuse of the federal immigration enforcement database. These include asking the attorney general to sue the nonprofit that runs the national database or participating states if they don’t adhere to data-sharing terms; requiring annual public reporting of data requests and any unusual usage patterns; and directs the DMV to write a monitoring plan to be in place by February 2027 and in final form by July 2027. It also directs the state auditor to evaluate compliance with the 2030 data sharing safeguards.

“The safeguards in place limit the information shared to the bare minimum,” H.D. Palmer, a Treasury Department spokesman, told Newsom.

But some advocates say the surveillance protections don’t go far enough.

“The railings will not prevent federal or other state law enforcement agencies from obtaining a warrant requiring (the interstate system) to retrieve and disclose data, including in bulk, and requiring (the system) not to disclose that fact,” said Ed Hasbrouck of the civil liberties group Identity Project.

Ronald Coleman Baeza, on behalf of the Immigrant Human Rights Coalition, thanked state lawmakers Monday for “making sure there are guardrails” around the data-sharing program, but also urged lawmakers to require an audit before 2030.

“We are disappointed that Social Security numbers will continue to be shared, but we appreciate that there will be a monitoring plan, a stakeholder process, as well as enforcement and auditing,” he said. “There will definitely be more work to do to make sure we are protecting Californians’ information in the driver’s license database system.”

Representatives from ACLU Cal Action and the California Immigrant Policy Center similarly thanked lawmakers for passing additional protections, but expressed concern about the potential impact on the lives of undocumented immigrants from sharing sensitive data with an out-of-state organization.

Sen. Laura Richardson, an Inglewood Democrat, questioned the data-sharing plan earlier this year. During a Senate budget hearing on Monday, she voiced support for data protection in the transportation bill. She also called on the auditor general to assess data sharing activity before 2030 “given our vulnerability in having this data”.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.