 Michelle Waslin is the next person to, she's the manager of the immigration and the state's project at the Pew Charitable Trusts. The project examines the intersection of federal, state and local immigration laws and policies and its impact on all levels of government. As the lead on Pew's work on immigration, Michelle tracks and analyzes policy and builds relationships with academics and other experts. Waslin has authored several publications on immigration policy and has appeared in English and Spanish language media. Prior to joining Pew, she worked as senior policy analyst at the Immigration Policy Centre, division of the American Immigration Council, as director of immigration policy research at the National Council of La Rasa and as policy coordinator at the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. So let's give a warm welcome to Michelle Waslin. Good afternoon. First I just want to thank you so much for inviting me to be here. This is really exciting for me. So the chapter I wrote for the book back there was about the intersection between driver's license policy and immigration enforcement. And these were two issues that I had been following as an advocate for a very long time. And I noticed over the years that driving had become this increasingly risky activity with a higher probability for deportation for unauthorized immigrants. And it was because of this combination of things. It was a combination of states restrictions on access to driver's licenses. And then you couple that with the expansion of programs like the Secure Communities Program, the Criminal Alien Program and other forms of cooperation between federal immigration enforcement officials and state and local police agencies. I call this outsourcing. I say it's the federal government is actually outsourcing the identification of people for potential deportation to state and local police. So the two forces together, right, the driver's licenses and the outsourcing have led to a reality in which unauthorized immigrants can be arrested and convicted for driving without a license. And this exposes them to federal immigration authorities and it could land them in deportation proceedings. So at the heart of this paper I realized it's about federalism, right? It's about the intersection between federal and state and local policies. So now I wrote the paper when I was at the immigration policy center. I was an advocate. Now I am an academic all of a sudden at the Pew Charitable Trusts. And my project, the immigration and the states project, is really looking at immigration through the lens of federalism. We are looking at the intersection between different levels of government, okay? So we are going to be over the next three years researching things like how do the different levels of government deal with the immigration issue? How do they interact with one another? What are the areas of cooperation and what are the areas of conflict between different levels of government? So today what I wanted to do is provide a little update of my paper but really focusing on the federalism aspect of this. So in this chapter, which I'm sure you've all read, I argued that driver's license policy and federal immigration enforcement partnerships with local law enforcement agencies really developed separately along different tracks. And that the people that were working on driver's licenses and the people that were working on this outsourcing issue weren't really thinking that eventually they were going to come together and we were going to deport a lot of people without driver's licenses. But looking now at what has happened just in the last year, just in the last week, we really see that states are definitely reacting to these federal actions, to federal enforcement activities. So what's happened in the years since I first wrote the chapter? Well first DACA was implemented, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program was implemented, and it forced states to make some decisions about what the DACA beneficiaries would be eligible for. Then at the same time we see a continuation of the federal government's deportation policies. And that, as was already mentioned, a good percentage of those people who are deported do not have serious criminal records. At the same time, as you know, in DC there is an ongoing comprehensive immigration reform debate, but nobody knows what's going to happen with that. We don't know if there will be legalization or not. So in the midst of all of this, states and localities are really getting a lot of pressure from advocates and from others. So states are looking at what the impact of these federal policies has been on them, and they're looking at the economic and the social costs associated with these different policies. And so now I think that states are definitely taking actions that are intended to snap this relationship between the driver's licenses and immigration enforcement. This is something they're doing on purpose. So let's just talk about DACA a little bit, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. States were responding to a federal action. States and localities made decisions about what this group of beneficiaries had access to, including driver's licenses. Immediately, officials in 45 states confirmed that DACA beneficiaries are eligible for driver's licenses. Under their current laws, people who benefited from DACA had the documentation necessary to get a driver's license in 45 states. In two states, Arizona and Nebraska, they announced that they would not issue state driver's licenses to DACA beneficiaries. So in Arizona, surprise, surprise, Governor Jan Brewer immediately announced that DACA recipients would not be allowed to get Arizona driver's licenses, and even singling them out from other people who got deferred action. So anybody else with deferred action could get a license, but not DACA beneficiaries. Just last month, I understand the Arizona Department of Transportation actually changed that policy so that now no one with deferred action can get a license. In Nebraska, Governor Dave Heineman issued a statement saying that the state would deny driver's licenses, welfare benefits and other public benefits to DACA beneficiaries, basically saying we don't give stuff to illegal immigrants and they're still illegals. In North Carolina, they initially refused to issue driver's licenses to DACA beneficiaries, but their state attorney general, like the lawyer-in-chief looked at this and looked at federal law and basically confirmed that people who have deferred action are lawfully present in the United States. They don't have a legal status, but they are lawfully present, and that's a very important distinction. So now North Carolina issues driver's licenses to DACA beneficiaries, but they say legal presence, no lawful status right across them. At first they were going to make a big pink stripe across them, but now they've decided to just include those words. But at the same time, advocates have been thinking about driver's licenses for a long time, and I just spoke to some advocates in preparing for this today, and they said that they saw driver's licenses as this real flashpoint because of this confluence of enforcement and driver's license policies. People need to drive, there's no legalization on the horizon, people are being deported, people are more vulnerable. So the advocacy community really made this concerted effort to go after states to change their driver's license policies. And in fact, eight more states just this year have changed their driver's license policies so that anybody who can prove all the eligibility requirements can get a license regardless of immigration status. So unauthorized immigrants will be able to get licenses in Illinois, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Oregon, Maryland, Nevada and Vermont. The California bill was just signed this past week, and Governor Jerry Brown, when he signed it, said, this is federalism. He said, while Washington waffles on immigration, California is forging ahead. I'm not waiting. Now all of these licenses from these eight states are going to be distinctive. They're going to look different from the other licenses in the states. California is going to have a special watermark on it in Illinois. Unauthorized immigrants will get a temporary visitor's license. Others will say something across it, so they will be distinctive. So this kind of means that they're still susceptible to increased scrutiny by the police if they're stopped or pulled over because they do look different. There's that scarlet letter aspect to it, and that brings up a really interesting issue that I'm not going to get into about the Real ID Act, another federal law that regulates state driver's licenses and how the two interact with one another. But I really want to get to this issue of local law enforcement involved in immigration enforcement. The latest statistics, as we'll hear, I know, have shown that despite ICE's continued comments that they're exercising prosecutorial discretion, that they're only going after the worst of the worst, that isn't really true. So according to the latest report from TRAC that tracks these things, roughly half of all detainers are placed on immigrants with no criminal convictions. And then the second group is people who have DUIs with 9.6% of all detainers, and then traffic offenses are third at 6% of all detainers. So you can see that this relationship between driving traffic and immigration enforcement is really important. If anybody doesn't know, a detainer is when the federal government is made aware of somebody in a jail through secure communities, the criminal alien programs, some kind of communication between the states and locals and the federal government, they place a detainer basically saying to the local cops, please hold this person for an additional 48 hours after you would have regularly released that person. So we can come pick that person up and bring him into immigration detention. So in response to these ICE detainers and the increased numbers of them and what kind of people they're being put on, several states and municipalities have now adopted policies that restrict federal enforcement activity and limit their own collaboration with ICE. So again, federalism, this is a direct response to what the federal government is doing. So Cook County, Illinois, Taos, New Mexico, San Francisco and Santa Clara, California, Washington D.C., Multnomah County, Oregon and Newark, New Jersey have all adopted these policies that are limiting their compliance with detainers. So in some cases, they won't honor any detainers. In some cases, they will only honor the detainer if the person has a conviction of a serious crime. Now, that's at the local and municipal level. At the state level, just recently a couple of states have also passed these laws. So the Connecticut Trust Act was signed in July and it limits the circumstances under which they will comply with ICE detainers. The California Trust Act was just signed on Saturday, I believe. And then in Colorado, their version of the Trust Act was signed in April. Basically, they had a law passed in 2006, which was a show me your papers law that police had to inquire about immigration status. So their Trust Act repealed that law. So it's slightly different. Trust Act, like legislation, was also introduced but is not yet passed in Washington State, Florida, Massachusetts and Washington D.C. So what does all this mean? So in conclusion, it's really complicated, right? The relationships between federal, state and local governments on immigration and immigration enforcement are really complicated. These driver's license laws and immigration enforcement did evolve separately over time, but they did come together in recent years in a way that resulted in many immigrants being identified for deportation because of a traffic violation, because they were driving without a license, or because when they were pulled over, they didn't have an identification document to show the police. So they were taken into the station, their fingerprints were sent to ICE and the detainer slapped on them, right? But people know about this, right? There are a lot of people who are doing a lot of education around this issue and states are now seeing the connection. They're responding to this. They're changing their driver's license laws so that more people have access to driver's licenses. They're restricting the use of detainers, especially for those people with minor offenses like driving without a license. I think what's really important here is that California, Connecticut and Colorado, the seas, passed both of these laws. They passed the detainer law and the driver's license law, and they definitely drew the connection between these two things. In Washington, D.C., they're on the verge of passing both of these laws, but they're held up for a variety of reasons. So we will see how other states respond, we'll see how the federal government responds, and so stay tuned. Thanks.