California is at an impasse with the Department of Motor Vehicles over sharing driver’s license data with other states

from Harry Johnson and Wendy FryCalMatters

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Subscribe to your newsletters.

This article is also available in English. Read it here.

The California Legislature wants to stop plans to share information about California drivers — including more than a million to immigrant license holders who do not have federal authorization to live in the US – with a little-known non-profit agency made up of administrators from all over the country.

The Assembly-Senate budget agreement released last Thursday preserves $55 million in funds earmarked for the California Department of Motor Vehicles to connect to a database that will begin fulfilling requests from other states for information on California drivers early next year.

The governor’s office and the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) want to share this information with the State-to-State system and the SPEX platform, which allows states to check for duplicate licenses and is managed by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators.

Because the system records the last five digits of a driver’s Social Security number and uses a marker such as “99999” for people who don’t have one, opponents of the plan warned it could easily identify drivers who don’t have a Social Security number.

Immigrant advocates fear that releasing this information could leave undocumented Californians vulnerable to deportation if the information falls into the hands of the Border Patrol or Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Californians can get a driver’s license regardless of their immigration statusunder a 2014 law known as Assembly Bill 60.

According to government officials, the data sharing is necessary to comply with the Real Identification Act of 2005, which establishes requirements for accepting government identification at federal facilities such as airports.

In response to the legislature’s budget proposal, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security urged people who do not have federal permission to live in the US to leave the country.

The Senate presented its budget proposal last Tuesday, but are not included funding the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) interstate inspection program. The Legislature has until June 15 to approve the budget, but has until June 30 to work out the details with the governor.

Excluding $55 million from the state budget won’t completely undo the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) plan, advocates say. Budget talks between the two chambers and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office could continue. Lawmakers can still revive appropriations through a supplemental budget law or a stand-alone budget bill.

However, that could mean the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) is unlikely to receive the funds by the July 1 date when data sharing is scheduled to begin, according to Jesse Schmidt, state policy manager for Alliance San Diego, a community-based human rights organization that is tracking the proposal. About 200 organizations have signed a letter of the Coalition in Opposition to the DMV’s Data Sharing Plan. This plan too sparked protests at a DMV branch in San Francisco earlier this month.

Some advocates credit CalMatters with bringing the issue to light in a news story published earlier this year.

“As you probably know, many organizations were unaware of these conversations until, thankfully, they were made public the CalMatters article, it made the problem visible to all those who didn’t have a say,” Schmidt said. “If they really cared about protecting Californians and doubling down on their privacy efforts, they wouldn’t be avoiding these conversations.”

The Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) needs more funding to implement the plan. State law prohibits the DMV from sharing the Social Security number obtained during the licensing process for most purposes, meaning the state needs additional legislation before providing information to the national nonprofit, a step that the DMV itself specify in your quote request.

The state wants to provide the information to American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAVM) a non-profit organization whose board of directors is made up of DMV employees from around the country. This information will be used to help other countries ensure that people do not simultaneously hold identity documents elsewhere. Advocates fear that local officials in those states could turn over information from the association’s database of suspected undocumented immigrants to the federal government. The association said its database does not allow mass searches or searches without specific information such as name and date of birth.

A spokesman for House Speaker Robert Rivas said discussions regarding funding for the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) are ongoing. The staffs of two other lawmakers did not respond to requests for information about the negotiations.

Newsom’s office referred questions to the Treasury Department. Spokesman HD Palmer said “discussions are ongoing and ongoing”.

At this point, it seems unlikely that an agreement will be reached before the deadline set by the DMV, said Andrea Guerrero, founder and executive director of Alliance San Diego.

“It is difficult to imagine what changes can be achieved while we are at the bottom of the table,” he said.

Ed Hasbrouck of the civil liberties group The Identity Project attended protests against the data-sharing plan at DMV offices in San Francisco earlier this month and participated in a conversation with the governor’s office and the DMV about the data-sharing plan in April.

He was pleased lawmakers decided to freeze funding for now, but said the most important thing going forward is for both the public and lawmakers to understand that once California driver data enters a statewide database, safeguards will no longer be possible because the plan requires data sharing for all licensees.

Ultimately, he said, the state will have to make a decision: Either roll back the promises made in AB 60 and put immigrants and other Californians at risk, or decide not to comply with the REAL ID Act and protect those Californians.

“It was delayed, but it’s a decision the state will have to make. It can’t just avoid it,” he said.

CalMatters reporter Yue Stella Yu contributed to this article.

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