Photo by Brad Sigal
License to Drive
Members of the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee, one of several grassroots groups that pushed for the “Driver’s Licenses for All” bill, gather at the state capitol.
I’m on a blustery Washington Avenue sidewalk when Sarah Silva pulls up in a cherry-red Hyundai Santa Fe. We had made plans to meet at her favorite coffee shop and drive around the city.
As I climb in, Silva plugs in our destination: the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee office in south Minneapolis. A civic engagement community organizer in her day job, Silva volunteers with MIRAC, which was one of the many grassroots organizations—including Unidos MN, Minnesota Immigrant Movement, Asamblea MN, and others—leading the two-decade fight for state driver’s licenses for undocumented Minnesotans. In March, they finally won: Gov. Walz signed the “Driver’s Licenses for All” bill into law.
Silva’s family emigrated from Mexico to Minnesota when she was 6. She became a DACA recipient in 2012 and was finally able to get her driver’s license at age 21. It was a happy moment. “I was like, Hell yes,” Silva says. “I ran to my car skipping, jumping, dancing. I was flipping out. It was so cool. And then I drove to Red Lobster. Gotta go to work.”
The license came with added responsibility. She gave her parents and younger siblings rides to school, work, and doctor’s appointments—wherever they needed to go.
“I got into a lot of problems at work for leaving,” Silva says. “But family’s family.”
Plus, she had learned to deal with adversity a long time ago. With her parents unable to obtain driver’s licenses, she would often walk home from school. As a teen, she mapped elaborate bus and light rail routes to meet friends at the Mall of America. Later, when she worked three jobs simultaneously, she took cabs and carpooled to get to work.
“I had to learn to be resilient and independent really, really early,” Silva says as we park outside the MIRAC office—a small brick building painted with a vivid mural of a red pine tree. “It really did make me understand who I am today and have compassion for people.”
There were times, though, when the system caught up with her. Before DACA and her ability to qualify for a license, she was driving home from work on a snowy Highway 62 and got in an accident. She walked away with a seven-year “driving without a license” stamp on her record, a $600 ticket, and a job she had to quit because she had no way to get there.
When she was little, Silva says, her mom was pulled over a few times. One situation she remembers vividly: Her 2-year-old sister was crying and fidgeting in her car seat as her mom sat pin-straight in the front, sweating, aware that she might be arrested on the spot. The cop let her go.
Through MIRAC, Silva testified in support of “Driver’s Licenses for All” in front of the state legislature, along with many others. “Everyone that was fighting for this, I saw as a part of me and my family,” Silva says. “That’s why I showed up to every little single thing that I could....People have been working on this for 20 years. That’s an incredibly long time to not be acknowledged as humans.”
Silva’s referring to the fact that, until 2003, all Minnesotans, regardless of immigration status, were eligible for driver’s licenses—but Gov. Tim Pawlenty changed the rules, barring undocumented people.
For much of the 20 years since, State Representative Carlos Mariani and Senators Patricia Torres Ray and Bobby Joe Champion had carried the “Driver’s Licenses for All” bill, but never had the votes needed to pass it.
That changed with the current Democratic trifecta. Representatives Aisha Gomez and María Isa Pérez-Vega spearheaded the bill in the house, and Senator Zaynab Mohamed worked with Champion in the senate. The senate passed it at 2 am during the massive snowstorm on February 22, and from there it went to the governor’s desk.
Mohamed credits the grassroots coalitions’ relentless work on the issue.
“People mobilized all across the state of Minnesota—in small towns, in Minneapolis,” she says.
She’s especially proud of the bill’s language, which surpasses that of many of the 19 other states with similar laws. It includes data privacy provisions so that drivers’ information isn’t accessible to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement without a judicial warrant, and the licenses themselves are unmarked—they have no indication that drivers are undocumented, as some other states’ do. (“We’re not second-class citizens,” Silva says.)
And despite some Republican opposition, Mohamed says “Driver’s Licenses for All” had remarkably broad coalition support, from groups as diverse as the Chamber of Commerce and law enforcement officials.
People across the aisle agreed on the bill’s safety and economic benefits—decreasing uninsured drivers and hit-and-runs (as studies show) and getting more people in the workforce—even when they diverged on what Mohamed calls the “human aspect” of the issue.
“These are humans who are part of our community, who are contributing to our society,” Mohamed says. “Above anything, they are neighbors. We should care about them, and we should make their lives a little bit easier.”
