CA to share driver’s license data despite immigrant fears

from Harry Johnson, Wendy Fry and Yue Stella YuCalMatters

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

The California Legislature authorized this exchange in state budget approved on Monday together with a separate transport measure that establishes some special data protection supervisory procedures.

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

Lawmakers had previously refused to approve a data-sharing plan while they found necessary protective measures at the end of last week.

The stakes are high for the more than one million immigrants who have driver’s licenses. The system records the last five digits of the driver’s social security number and uses the wildcard “99999” for those who do not have one. Advocates worry that entering that information into a national database could expose undocumented Californians to federal immigration authorities, and in April they told CalMatters 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 Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) will use to enable the exchange 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 state that the system only allows one record to be viewed at a time with the information provided by the requester and that it is not possible to perform bulk searches.

The new legislation includes additional measures to protect immigrants from improper use of the federal immigration enforcement database. Those measures include asking the attorney general to sue the nonprofit that runs the national database or participating states if they don’t comply with data-sharing terms; require annual public reporting of data requests and any unusual usage patterns; and directs the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to develop a monitoring plan, with a draft to be ready by February 2027 and a final version by July 2027. It also directs the state auditor to evaluate compliance with data-sharing safeguards beginning in 2030.

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

But some advocates say the oversight measures aren’t enough.

“The safeguards would not prevent federal or other state law enforcement agencies from obtaining an order compelling (the Interstate System) to retrieve and disclose data, even in large amounts, and prohibiting (the system) from disclosing that fact,” said Ed Hasbrouck of the civil liberties group Identity Project.

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

“We are disappointed that Social Security numbers continue to be shared, but appreciate that a monitoring plan, stakeholder engagement process, and compliance and audit measures are in place,” he said. “There is certainly more work to be done to ensure the protection of 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, D-Inglewood, questioned the data-sharing plan earlier this year. At a Senate budget hearing on Monday, he expressed support for the data protection measures included in the transport bill. It also called on the auditor general to assess data-sharing activity before 2030, “given our vulnerability in having this data publicly available”.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under license Creative Commons Attribution/Attribution-Noncommercial.