A controversial California law has allowed thousands of undocumented residents to obtain driver’s licenses at a time when President-elect Donald Trump, who takes office next month, vowed to crackdown on illegal immigration.
AB 60 was implemented on Jan. 1, 2015 and allowed an estimated 806,000 undocumented residents to receive driver’s licenses in the next two years, according to Department of Motor Vehicles statistics cited by Mercury News.
The month of November, which saw Trump being elected as president of the United States, also marked the issuing of 14,000 of these licenses by the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) in California as offices remained packed with immigrants hoping to make the most of the opportunity.
“Many of them have been able to drive their kids to school and to run errands, when many times they were taking buses that would take them up to three hours to get from point A to point B,” she said. “It opened up new opportunities,” Maricela Gutierrez, executive director of immigration advocacy group, Services, Immigrant Rights, and Education Network (SIREN), told Mercury News.
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