By Brian Zimmer

Donald Trump, now the Republican nominee for President, defeated his primary rivals in part by focusing on illegal immigration, championing a proposal to "build a wall" on the southern border. That proposal does nothing to address the status of the eleven million plus illegal immigrants already here. REAL ID and the SAVE system, however, require DMVs to determine whether driver's license applicants are lawfully present in the United States. If applicants are not able to prove lawful presence, the state must issue a driver's license clearly marked to indicate that fact.

The federal government has created the SAVE system to provide a low cost verification system to DMVs for this purpose. The cost is a nickel per individual transaction, or one fourth of one cent if the DMV user runs a "batch" of applicants through a separate process on a regularly scheduled basis. For example, the State of California has run a nightly batch process on all new non-U.S. citizen applicants for more than a decade. By contrast, Pennsylvania signed up as a SAVE transactional user some years ago, but actual transactional queries are at the discretion of the local office supervisor. Regardless, an individual state that uses the batch system to check on all applicants may decide to issue a driver's license to an applicant despite a "negative" answer from SAVE regarding their lawful presence status.  States that have changed their driver's license processes to move to "central issuance" versus over the counter issuance are able to use the nightly batch process to verify applicants' lawful presence for 5% of the costs of individual queries.

However, there is only one "fail safe" automated process for verifying lawful presence by your local DMV office. That's the totally automated system provided by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, Verification of Lawful Status (VLS). In short, every application marked in some other way than "U.S. Citizen" is automatically referred to the VLS system, which then queries SAVE directly through a secure electronic handshake. If the VLS response shows anything other than a valid lawful status, the applicant is offered the opportunity to present additional immigration information. In most cases, the applicant opts out of the application process rather than making an appeal. At this date, Florida and Texas, two of the states with the largest populations of illegal immigrants, use VLS. So does Nevada, South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Connecticut, Maryland, Tennessee, North Carolina, Mississippi, and New Mexico. Together, these states issue roughly one half of the driver's licenses in the country. Whether proof of lawful presence actually happens in the states that comprise the other half is problematical.