New York’s Driver’s Licenses for Illegal Aliens Halts Verification of American Citizens’ Identities

The IDs of American citizens in New York can no longer be quickly verified by federal immigration officials since the state started issuing driver’s licenses to illegal aliens this week.

Hundreds of thousands of the roughly 725,000 illegal aliens are now eligible to receive driver’s licenses to legally drive in the sanctuary state of New York despite never supposedly to having been in the country.

The new law, known as “Green Light NY,” comes with a new set of obstacles for American citizens from New York who encounter the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

ICE has been banned from the New York state ID database, making it impossible for ICE agents to quickly check the immigration status of anyone they come in contact with. This provision means agents have no way to verify the validity of New York state-issued IDs.

An ICE official told Breitbart News:

If you can’t run a license number, there’s no way to know that’s a legitimate license or if you printed that on your computer. That is going to require additional work on [ICE’s] part and there are real security concerns.

In addition, the blockage of the state’s database prevents ICE agents from using the verification system to check records in violent criminal cases involving human trafficking, child sex crimes, gang activity, and child exploitation.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio called the issue nothing more than “scare tactics” and insisted that the law “makes everyone safer when every driver on our roads has a license.”

A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson responded to de Blasio:

ICE’s resources are already strained as the agency has about 6,000 deportation agents to enforce interior immigration law spread across its 24 field offices. For perspective, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) has six times this level, with about 36,000 officers for the city of 8.5 million.

Though state Democrats, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, de Blasio, and the open borders lobby have united behind providing driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, New York voters by a majority have opposed the measure.

A Siena College poll from June revealed that 53 percent of New Yorkers oppose giving driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, including 62 percent of upstate New Yorkers and more than 5-in-10 suburban voters in the state.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.