Bartamaha —-That’s what the Somali visitor got when he went to the Texas Department of Public Safety office to replace his driver’s license after it was stolen.

The denial stemmed from the man’s relatively obscure immigration designation: temporary protected status. TPS, as it’s known in the alphabet soup of U.S. immigration jargon, refers to the type of legal U.S. residency granted to nationals of specially designated countries where conditions temporarily prevent their safe return.

A DPS worker asked the Somali man about his immigration status, recalled his Austin-based attorney, Jennifer Walker Gates. When her client told the staffer he had TPS, the worker asked a follow-up question: “What’s TPS?”

“There’s my poor Somali client trying to explain to the agents of the Department of Public Safety what temporary protected status is, and how it works, and needless to say it didn’t go well,” Walker Gates said. “They kicked him out. He wasn’t rude or anything, but he couldn’t explain how it works. There’s a language barrier and your own understanding of an immigration status can be a challenge.”

The Somali client is not alone. Many non-immigrant visa holders living, working and studying legally in the United States are facing problems replacing or renewing their driver’s licenses due to state workers’ lack of familiarity with all the various types of legal status and the federal documentation that accompanies them.

One major wrinkle for these foreign nationals is the requirement that they produce documentation showing they have at least six months of legal status remaining if they want to obtain or renew a Texas driver’s license.

“I‘ve been practicing immigration law for five years,” said Walker Gates, “and I am still confused a lot of times with someone’s particular status and can’t imagine if I was completely untrained in this area and I was trying to sort through what somebody’s documents mean.”

Starting Oct. 1, 2008, DPS began requiring driver’s license applicants who are not U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents — green card holders — to present proof of their lawful status in the United States before they are issued an original, renewal, or duplicate Texas driver’s license or identification card.

The number of visa holders with driver’s licenses continues to grow, from 79,041 in fiscal year 2008 to 109,283 last year. Visa holders have to renew their driver’s license every time they get a new visa, which could be every year.

Temporary visitors authorized to live in the United States while their green card application is pending can run into trouble if they are pulled over by law enforcement.

Extensions and visas granted to them may not reach them until months after their most recent proof of legal status has already expired. While stuck in this limbo, they are often unable to obtain or maintain their status as licensed drivers.

Houston-based immigration attorney Candace L. Cowan has also had clients who have run into licensing problems due to DPS officials’ lack of familiarity with all the intricacies of U.S. immigration law.

Some of her clients were denied driver’s licenses because their Form I-94 — the arrival-departure record that is issued to non-immigrant visitors and indicates the expiration of their authorized stay — was not stamped by a federal immigration officer.

Visa holders can renew their I-94 if they qualify for an extension or their status is pending further processing. In that case, the I-94 is not stamped but rather is printed on green security paper.

Both Walker Gates and Cowan took their clients’ cases to the highest level in DPS, where they received assistance from Brian Riemenschneider, staff attorney for the agency’s Driver License Division.

In both of their cases, their clients’ immigration documents were recognized as valid, and they were issued driver’s licenses.

Riemenschneider candidly told the attorneys his agency was having a difficult time properly training staff to navigate federal immigration policy and preparing guidance that would be uniformly applied statewide.

The DPS attorney, speaking through agency spokeswoman Lisa Block, declined an interview request, citing pending litigation in the matter.

Both Cowan and Walker Gates have since noticed changes in DPS policy, however. The agency now recognizes TPS as a type of visa. And unlike before, people with legitimate visas can now get a driver’s license even if they have no Social Security number.

“I went to the website with the DPS chart for guidance to their officers regarding issuance of driver’s licenses,” Cowan said in a statement. “I was pleased to see that they have revised (it), apparently in September or October of this year. It is much better.

“I noticed that, at my suggestion, the chart clarified the description of the I-94 to include the printed I-94 issued as part of an extension of a non-immigrant visa.”

Despite the improvements to the system, foreign nationals in Texas still cannot get a standard driver’s license. Instead, they are issued a card with a vertical orientation resembling the licenses issued to teen drivers.

“I think it feels bad to (the driver) because they are sort of singled out or distinguished from other drivers based on immigration status,” Walker Gates said.

“Everywhere that you need to show ID, you are basically divulging that you are not a U.S. citizen,” she said. “There is so much hostility toward immigrants in the general public that having to divulge that information to people that you do not know (and who are not authorities) is very uncomfortable. It puts you at some risk of being mistreated in many different ways.”

It also hurts the economy when many of these legal visitors are barred from driving, Cowan said. Many of them, she noted, are engineers, educators or company managers.

“We are talking about pretty good-paid people, coming over here for a year or six years,” Cowan said. “These are pretty important people in our economy, at least here in Houston, and even in the Valley.“

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Source:- The Monitor.

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