Georgia continues its racist attempts to disenfranchise minorities. This time, they’re targeting Puerto Ricans specifically. Thankfully, advocates have filed a class action suit over it in Federal court.
The lead plaintiff is Kenneth Caban Gonzalez, who says he moved from Puerto Rico to Hinesville, Georgia, two years ago seeking a better life.
After meeting a 30-day residency requirement, Gonzalez submitted an application for a Georgia driver’s license on Oct. 31, 2017, but his request was never approved even though he handed over all necessary documentation, according to the complaint.
Though he was later able to receive a state identification card, Gonzalez claims the agency never returned his old driver’s license, his original birth certificate or his Social Security card, and never explained why he was ineligible for a driver’s license.
They kept his original birth certificate! I don’t know that I’d surrender my original birth certificate to any government agency, though Gonzales wasn’t given the choice. The horrors don’t stop there, though. It actually gets worse:
The lawsuit says the department retained the driver’s license, birth certificate and Social Security card and told him he would be notified when he could pick them up. A few days later, he received a text from the department asking him to come to the Savannah office for an interview.
When he arrived, he was arrested on allegations that he had provided false documents. He was later charged in Liberty County Superior Court with one count of first-degree forgery and another of making false statements. Those charges are still pending.
[…] The lawsuit says the department has not explained why it believes Caban Gonzalez’s original documents are false. Nor has it explained why it provided an ID card but not a driver’s license.
The state says it has “reasons”:
According to the suit, the Georgia agency retains documentation from Puerto Rico-born driver’s license applicants to have them “flagged for fraud review.”
Why? How?? Federal law doesn’t prevent states from erecting barriers to specific populations obtaining state-level government services. If Georgia wants to make Puerto Ricans and only Puerto Ricans pass a test about their knowledge of Puerto Rican foodstuffs and wildlife just to get a driver’s license, they can.
The lawsuit says the agency also keeps a Puerto Rican applicants’ documents if they determine that the person failed to answer questions about the U.S. territory, including the name of a meat-filled plantain fritter and the name of the frog that is native to Puerto Rico — something that is not required of U.S. citizens born in a state.
Vasquez said that employees at the Georgia Department of Driver’s Services (DDS) use a “DDS Puerto Rican Interview Guide” that includes questions about the meaning of colloquial terms such as “pegao,” or crusty rice, and additional trick questions such as the name of an inland city’s nonexistent beach and how long is the nonexistent train ride between San Juan and Fajardo.
“The so-called quiz, applied to Puerto Rican drivers, bears a strikingly disturbing resemblance to the tests applied by segregationists to block voter registration of people of color,” said Gerry Weber, senior attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights, who is working on the case alongside LatinoJustice.
It looks like a state-issued ID card is as valid as a driver’s license for voter registration purposes, and Gonzales did eventually get an ID card. None of the articles I’ve read mentions whether he tried to vote last November, or whether he was denied, so I can’t honestly say that voter suppression is the goal. [Update: he didn’t get his ID card until January, so he wouldn’t have been eligible to register/vote in November.] But discrimination certainly is.
However, the lawsuit alleges that the agency’s practices fail to comply with constitutionally protected equal protection provisions because it treats Puerto Rico-born American citizens differently than those born in the U.S. mainland, by “not giving them a chance for a fair hearing” if their driver’s license application is denied and making them undergo additional tests “to answer questions about Puerto Rico in order to prove that they are Puerto Rican.”
To recap: Kenneth Caban Gonzalez, a Puerto Rico-born U.S. citizen living in Georgia, applied for a Georgia driver’s license in Oct. 2017. As of July 2019, he has not been issued a license, nor has he been told why his application was denied. Further, he was arrested for providing false documents without being told which documents were falsified, though they were confiscated from him, and he still has charges pending against him. And he still can’t drive legally.
You can read the lawsuit here.
Repeat after me, Georgia: Puerto Rico is part of the U.S. Puerto Rico is part of the U.S. Puerto Rico is part of the U.S.…