 |
||||||||
 |
||||||||
|
||||||||
Back
|
Immigrants face license maze
By LEONORA LaPETERand DONG-PHUONG NGUYEN It is a tiny room, a place where you sit and wait after getting your name on a list. A young Vietnamese woman chats on her cell phone. Six members of a good-humored Bosnian family clutch their drivers' licenses and green cards and trade jokes. A Hispanic couple converses quietly, a stack of documents between them. This is the driver's license office in Pinellas Park, the only one in the county that deals with residents who are not U.S. citizens. It can be a frustrating, complicated maze where you're only as valid as the papers you hold, and your driver's license can be taken away if you don't have the right ones.
"I don't like being treated like this," he said. "We are good citizens."
In Pinellas County, that office is in Pinellas Park. In Hillsborough County, it is in Tampa. Miami-Dade, Orange and Broward counties have eight designated offices among them. In the state's 62 other counties, those who are noncitizens can go to any driver's license office. Although the documents needed to obtain a driver's license haven't changed, the requirements for those attempting to renew, change an address or clear up a problem have. Florida's estimated 2.8-million drivers who are noncitizens must produce those documents every time they do anything. If they don't have them, they risk losing their license or identification card until they produce them. That happened to Kiet Le, a 28-year-old Vietnamese immigrant who tried to get a driver's license and ended up losing his identification card. "They just cut it up," he said in Vietnamese, as he stood outside Hillsborough County's only driver's license office for residents who aren't citizens in Tampa. "I didn't do anything wrong. All I wanted was a license so that I can drive to work." Le started out earlier in the week at a motor vehicles office in St. Petersburg, where the identification card was taken away because he didn't have his immigration papers with him. He was sent to a second office in St. Petersburg, where he was again turned away. On Thursday, his friend, Jason Phan, drove him to the Tampa location with his immigration papers. He didn't have an appointment, so he stood outside for about an hour. When he was called, the DMV worker looked at his papers and noticed an outdated stamp on one of his documents. "I'm so confused," Le said. "I didn't know I had to go through all of this. Now I have to go to INS and fix this before I can get my license. That's more lines." Mrs. Estrada, 37, ended up having her driver's license cut up as well. Although her husband, a Vietnam veteran, was able to prove that she was on his insurance, she decided to renew her license. So, she was issued a 30-day driving permit. Copies of her documents will be sent to Tallahassee and checked against the National Law Enforcement Tracking System to see whether there are any outstanding warrants against her. Once these checks have been made, she will be issued her regular license. Its expiration date will coincide with the expiration date on her permanent resident card in 2004. The new rules governing noncitizens, including the designation of specific offices to handle their needs, went into effect Dec. 13. The changes are intended to make it harder for potential terrorists to get identification. At least 13 of the 19 terrorists involved in the Sept. 11 attacks had Florida ID cards or drivers' licenses. Some foreigners living in this country aren't taking any chances. A family of six from Bosnia went to the office in Pinellas Park just to make sure the expiration card on their drivers' licenses matched the expiration date on their green cards -- even though it's not a requirement. "We wanted to be on the safe side," said Jasmin Cirkic, who works in the shipping department of a pharmaceutical company in St. Petersburg. Several hundred workers in the offices that handle noncitizens and the top two supervisors in all the other driver's license offices have been trained by officials from the Immigration and Naturalization Service to review foreign identification, said Robert Sanchez, a spokesman for the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. Meanwhile, there is a movement to designate specific standards for all states to follow in issuing drivers' licenses and identification. Florida passed legislation in 1999 requiring prospective drivers to prove they are in the country legally. Four states still don't require noncitizens to prove they are in the United States legally: Utah, Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee, Sanchez said. But some think state officials are going too far. "I can understand the tightened security, but it's not their fault," said George March, 49, a retired postal worker, pointing to his new 28-year-old Filipino wife, Mae, whom he met over the Internet. He was trying to get her an identification card, but her married name does not match the name on her passport. They were headed to the INS office in Tampa. "Everything is so confusing. I can't imagine how foreign citizens come here and get anything done. It's very, very hard."
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111 
|
Headlines From the Times local news desks |
"I'm retired from the U.S. Army and I feel like I'm from Japan," said Hector Estrada, 47, a U.S. citizen attempting to resolve a discrepancy with the driver's license of his wife, Norma, from Mexico. It was late afternoon and he had spent most of his third wedding anniversary waiting in several lines at three different driver's license offices.
Pinellas and Hillsborough counties and three other Florida counties have so many residents who aren't U.S. citizens that the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles has set up specific offices to handle their needs.
