Two non-profit organizations, Familias En Accion and Los Ninos Cuentan, and five illegal aliens are suing Oregon Governor, Kate Brown, and other state transportation officials saying that their constitutional rights were violated when voters struck down S.B. 833, which allowed illegal aliens to receive driver’s license.
The bill required the Department of Transportation to issue a driver’s license to any applicant who meets the driving requirements regardless if they could provide proof of legal status, as long as they had been in Oregon for at least a year. The bill was pushed through the state legislature and signed into law in 2013, yet before the bill could be implemented Oregonians for Immigration Reform (OFIR), a pro-immigration enforcement group, gathered 58,000 signatures for a ballot initiative to let the voters decide if they wanted the law.
The referendum passed by a 66% vote, rescinding the law. Now those pursing the lawsuit say that the referendum was motivated by a “desire to punish” them and claim that “it is not a crime for a person to seek or engage in unauthorized work in the United States.”
OFIR has filed a motion to intervene in the case and according to their attorneys at the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), the Oregon attorney general’s office brief volunteers the argument that the Fourteenth Amendment protects minority groups from being targeted by state action.
Julie Axelrod, the IRLI counsel for the case says that this constitutional provision does not exist and if it did, “this would be fatal to U.S. immigration law as a whole, which necessarily ‘targets’ illegal aliens and specifically states that aliens ‘shall be removed’ from the country should they enter without inspection.”
To see which states currently offer driver's license to illegal aliens check out our NumbersUSA map.
For more on this story go to Breitbart.com.
