California legislature at odds with DMV over driver’s license data sharing

from Harry Johnson and Wendy FryCalMatters

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California Legislature Wants to Stop Plans to Share Information About California Drivers — Including More Than 1 Million immigrant license holders who do not have federal authorization to live in the US – with a little-known non-profit agency made up of motor vehicle administrators across the country.

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

The governor’s office and 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 placeholder like “99999” for people without one, opponents of the plan warned it could easily flag drivers who don’t have a Social Security number.

Immigrant advocates worry that the ramp-up could leave undocumented Californians vulnerable to deportation if information reaches the Border Patrol or Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Californians are eligible to obtain a standard driver’s license regardless of their immigration status under a 2014 law known as Assembly Bill 60.

State officials say the data sharing is necessary to comply with the Real Identification Act of 2005, which sets 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 encouraged people who do not have federal permission to live in the US to leave the country.

The Senate released its budget proposal Tuesday night and funding for the DMV’s cross-state inspection program was not included. The Legislature has until June 15 to pass a budget, but has until June 30 to work out the details of the budget with the governor.

Dropping $55 million from the state budget won’t completely kill the DMV plan, advocates said. Budget negotiations between the two chambers and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office may continue. Lawmakers can still revive the appropriations through follow-up budget legislation or a separate budget bill.

But that could mean the DMV is unlikely to receive the funding by July 1, the date it has set to begin sharing the data, according to Jesse Schmidt, state policy manager at Alliance San Diego, a community-based human rights organization that is tracking the proposal. Nearly 200 organizations signed on a letter from the Coalition in Opposition to the DMV’s Data Sharing Plan. The data sharing plan too attracted protesters to a DMV branch in San Francisco earlier this month.

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

“As you probably know, many organizations were unaware of these conversations until, fortunately, the CalMatters article came out and brought some air to this conversation for everyone who didn’t have a seat at the table,” Schmidt said. “If you were really serious about protecting Californians and doubling down on privacy concerns, you wouldn’t be running away from these conversations.”

The DMV needs more funding to implement the plan. State law prohibits the DMV from sharing a Social Security number obtained through the licensing process for most purposes, meaning the state needs additional legislation before providing information to the national nonprofit, a DMV step budget request notes.

The state wants to provide the information to American Association of Motor Vehicle Administratorsa non-profit organization whose board of directors is made up of DMV employees from around the country. It will be used to help other countries ensure that people do not hold identity documents elsewhere at the same time. Advocates worry that local officials in those states may release information from the association’s database of apparent unauthorized immigrants to the federal government. The association said its database cannot be searched in bulk or without specific information such as name and date of birth.

A spokesman for Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas said discussions about funding the California DMV are ongoing. The staff of two other lawmakers also did not respond to a request 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 late hour, it seems unlikely that a compromise will be reached by the deadline given by the DMV, said Andrea Guerrero, founder and executive director of Alliance San Diego.

“It’s hard to imagine what kind of change can be made while standing at the end of a plank,” she said.

CalMatters reporter Yue Stella Yu contributed to this story.

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