After a federal judge signaled that Gov. Jan Brewer’s denial of driver’s licenses to some undocumented immigrants may be unconstitutional, a civil-rights group challenging the policy warned that Arizona might attempt an even broader ban.
Federal Judge David Campbell, who is presiding over the lawsuit challenging the state policy, issued a preliminary finding in May saying he found merit in the argument that Brewer’s decision to deny driver’s licenses to those benefiting from “deferred action for childhood arrivals” violates the equal-protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.
The judge noted that Arizona had granted licenses to immigrants who received work permits through other forms of deferred action before President Barack Obama began the program for young immigrants last year.
The program allows undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. before they were 16 and are under 31 years old to apply for a two-year reprieve from deportation.
Dan Pochoda, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, one of the groups suing the state over the policy, said Arizona’s attorneys told the court during a status conference last week that the state would within 30 to 60 days have a new driver’s license policy that would render an equal-protection argument moot.
Pochoda said the state now has two options: It could either reverse Brewer’s policy to allow participants in Obama’s program to receive driver’s licenses, or stop giving licenses to immigrants who received work permits through other forms of deferred action.
Asked how the state might address equal protection, Brewer’s spokesman, Matthew Benson, said the state Department of Transportation and its attorneys “are reviewing the state’s driver’s license procedures as they pertain to deferred-action recipients. I don’t have a timeline for when that review is going to be completed and what comes of that. The department wants to make certain that the state’s driver’s license procedures are being applied equitably.”
Over the past eight years, Arizona has issued licenses and ID cards nearly 40,000 times to non-citizens who had federal employment-authorization documents.
Pochoda said ending the practice of issuing licenses to immigrants who received work permits through other forms of deferred action would be “a vindictive move” by state officials, one motivated “by their interest in getting out from under the legal arguments” of the lawsuit.
“They’re willing to sacrifice the rights and well-beings of other groups that have been getting driver’s licenses for years,” Pochoda said. “The sole catalyst for the change ... would be solely to try to win this case and continue to try to deny licenses to ‘dreamers.’ ”
Campbell refused in May to suspend Brewer’s August 2012 order to deny driver’s licenses to the young undocumented immigrants who receive work permits through the program, but he left open the possibility that those immigrants may get driver’s licenses in the future.
The state has argued that undocumented immigrants who receive work permits through the program are not eligible for driver’s licenses because they have no legal authority in the United States. But the federal government has said that while they don’t have legal status, they do have legal presence.
In the months following Brewer’s order, the state has issued more than 1,000 driver’s licenses or ID cards to non-citizens with work permits while denying licenses to those with work permits issued through Obama’s program, an Arizona Republic analysis of state data found. More than 14,000 immigrants in Arizona have received deferred action through Obama’s program.
Work permits are issued to non-citizens for a variety of reasons, including to those granted temporary protected status due to natural disasters in their home countries, to victims of domestic violence and to undocumented immigrants fighting deportation in Immigration Court so they can support themselves while their cases are resolved.
