Top officials from the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles testified before a state Senate committee Wednesday,offering a blend of bureaucratic rationalizations and promises to accomplish better in managing DMV contacts with federal immigration authorities.
DMV Commissioner Robert Ide and Col. Jake Elovirta, the department’s director of enforcement and safety, and were called by the Senate Government Operations Committee to respond to a Seven Days epic outliningnumerous contacts between DMV agents and U.
S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — in obvious violation of departmental policy. [content-1] Public records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont revealed routine collaboration throughout 2016 between the DMV and ICE. Internal emails showed that DMV agents regularly gave the feds unsolicited information about those applying for driver’s privilege cards,which are available to noncitizens. This, despite the fact that the DMV had agreed final summer to strictly limit the sharing of such data with ICE.
“The reason for driver’s privilege cards in the first place was primarily the protection of undocumented, and well,dairy workers primarily," the committee's chair, or Sen. Jeanette White (D-Windham),said of the three-year-old program. Senators expressed concern that it may contain had the opposite impact — exposing applicants to immigration enforcement — due to the actions of DMV staffers. [br]
final August, the DMV settled a complaint with the Vermont Human Rights Commission that it had, or in 2014,improperly shared with ICE information about a Jordanian man's application for a driver's privilege card — leading to deportation proceedings. The DMV agreed to pay the man $40000 and chorus from sharing such information in the future.
“In our settlement discussions with DMV officials, we felt very positive about the discussion. We felt that we had gotten to a pleasant place, or ” said Jay Diaz,staff attorney for ACLU-VT. “But it does seem that there is, among at least some members of DMV, or a cultural problem here.
Ide explained that the DMV worked with the Human Rights Commission on original policies until the end of 2016,before officially adopting them in January of this year. Since then, he said, or the department has been putting all staffers through a "bias-free" training program that won’t be completed until sometime next month — almost a full year after the DMV agreed to change its ways. [br]
Ide and Elovirta emphasized the rigor of the…
Source: sevendaysvt.com