WASHINGTON ― An office that provides driver’s license services in Orlando, Florida, had a problem: The parking lot was crowded from an influx of customers, and cars were getting towed.
So the administration of the Orange County Tax Collector’s office, which is headed by a Democrat, came up with a number of solutions. They opened the office an hour earlier. They urged customers to visit other locations when lines were long. They discouraged nearby businesses from contacting towing companies. And starting early last month, they eliminated all written tests at that office and began turning away one particular group of people seeking driver’s license services.
That group? Non-U.S. citizens, including lawful permanent residents, according to an office spokesman.
Providing driver’s license services to members of this group can be “complicated” and “very time-consuming too, especially if we have to get on the phone with any federal agencies to verify certain kinds of documents,” Eddie Ayala, the spokesman for the county tax collector’s office, told HuffPost. The catalyst for the new policies, he said, was that “we’d have the tow truck drivers kind of staking out the parking lot every day and yanking our customers left and right. It’s super inconvenient for them.”
But the change means that in most cases, legal immigrants who go to the office on Lee Vista Boulevard for driver’s license services are redirected at least 12 miles away to the East Orange office, the next closest location that serves them, according to Ayala.
If an employee determines there’s a “special circumstance,” like a customer does not have transportation or is unable to visit another office, that customer will be served on-site, Ayala noted. But before the new policy was implemented, more than 250 non-U.S. driver’s license transactions were conducted at the location weekly, based on Ayala’s recollection ― and last week, it had fallen to about 35. The numbers have “been reduced pretty significantly,” he said.
The website of the tax collector’s office only states that at that particular location ― and one other ― “driver license services are restricted to U.S. citizens only.” HuffPost learned about the policy after a user on Reddit claimed that a friend who has a green card was “refused service because she’s ‘not a citizen.’” (The Redditor said the friend did not want to be interviewed.)
As described, Jennifer Chang Newell, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union Immigrants’ Rights Project, said the policy at the Lee Vista office “raises troubling concerns under both the Equal Protection Clause and federal civil rights law.”
The current policy is “horrific,” said Isabel Sousa-Rodriguez, director of membership and organizing for the Florida Immigrant Coalition. “It puts the burden on the individual to fight for their equal treatment under the law.”
Ayala said it’s “offensive” to suggest the Lee Vista office’s policy is discriminatory.
“When we look at this policy, it’s not something that we see through the prism of affecting a specific class of people,” he said. “We look at this in terms of the type of transaction.”
The policy, Ayala said, “relates to driver license and ID services only because of the complexity of those transactions. All other services are available to every resident, including non-U.S. citizens.”
He noted that this is a “temporary fix” ― parking is still an issue at the office ― and said they are searching for properties in the area to move to. Five of the county’s seven office locations still serve non-U.S. citizens. Another office, in downtown Orlando, stopped serving non-U.S. citizens in 2014 for “basically the same reasoning,” Ayala said. “It’s also another office where we’re trying to reduce the foot traffic that goes in... We don’t do written tests there as well.”
The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles told HuffPost it was not involved in enacting the policy at the Lee Vista office, and that the department “does not restrict services for customers in counties where it operates driver license offices.”
HuffPost surveyed several other states to see if there were similar policies elsewhere. In South Carolina, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Motor Vehicles said that due to the “complexity” of processing international licenses, only about a third of the state’s 67 DMV branches carry out transactions for international customers, including lawful permanent residents.
“Due to specialized training for certain transactions, people have to travel to specific branches across the state frequently,” the spokeswoman explained in an email. Her other examples included motorcycle testing and obtaining a commercial driver’s license.
In Texas, all driver’s license facilities operated by the state’s Department of Public Safety “process legal foreign nationals,” according to a spokesperson.
In California, all 173 DMV field offices not only process lawful permanent residents, but accept driver’s license applications for undocumented Californians as well, according to a California Department of Motor Vehicles spokeswoman. (A number of other states have similar laws concerning undocumented immigrants, but Florida is not one of them.)
As described, the policy at the Lee Vista office appears to raise some “serious constitutional questions,” said Wendy Weiser, who directs the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.
“States generally may not discriminate against non-citizens in the provision of services,” she said, unless “the discrimination is necessary to meet a compelling state interest.”
This story has been updated to include comments from Weiser and the Florida DHSMV and additional comments from Ayala.
Clarification: Language has been amended to indicate more clearly that the Lee Vista office is not operated by the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles, but by the office of the Orange County Tax Collector, which provides driver’s license services.