Driving While Illegal in New Orleans

It’s rare to have good news to report from New Orleans these days, but The Times Picayune had an article about illegal aliens being arrested.

It was Monday morning, and Juan Herrera was doing what he always did on Monday mornings: driving to work. But on Oct. 2, at 8:25 a.m., New Orleans police officer David Finneman spied what he believed to be an expired license tag on Herrera’s 1990 Buick Century. He put on his cruiser’s blue lights and pulled Herrera over near the corner of Palmyra Street and North Carrollton Avenue.

In the end, Finneman arrested Herrera not just for an expired license tag but also for driving a motor vehicle without valid immigration documents, a violation of state law.

The law was enacted in 2002, not long after the Sept. 11 attacks, to prevent “terrorism on the highways,” according to its author, state Sen. James David Cain, R-Dry Creek.

This law was rarely enforced before Hurricane Katrina brought an influx of Latino workers to the area, said Ramona Fernandez of the Loyola Law Clinic. In fact, Fernandez could think of only one pre-Katrina arrest.

Finneman hadn’t even heard of the law until his commanders read a memo about it during a precinct roll call in late 2005.

But these days it’s being enforced regularly. Kenner police Capt. James Gallagher said his department’s arrests under this law have stepped up “quite a bit” since the hurricane. Currently, his officers make “one or two arrests a day” on this charge, he said.

According to the Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff’s Office, 225 people have been arrested on the charge since Katrina and most have had Latino surnames. Advocates of immigrant rights refer to the charge as “driving while Latino.”

Well, if by “Latino” they mean “citizen of a foreign country who violated United States’ immigration laws” then, sure. The fine is one thousand dollars, a year in jail, or both. One person commented in the article that these people were just driving to work. Well, I can think of one guy who was NOT driving to work. The drunk who plowed into my mother and daughter a few months ago. He was so drunk that they couldn’t perform a sobriety test even after they got a spanish speaking officer to explain it to him. I regret that he wasn’t taken off the road sooner.

The TP reports that some attorneys don’t like it:

“Essentially, their argument is that Louisiana should not be in the business of creating and enforcing immigration law, since that’s the federal government’s territory.”

It won’t last. A judge ruled that this arrest was “the result of a selective enforcement policy profiling, targeting and arresting Latino drivers.” Another judge ruled the same way in a similar case, and the law is going to be challenged. Until it gets sorted out,

[D]istrict attorneys in Jefferson Parish and Orleans have signaled that they will hold off on further prosecution of undocumented driver cases. Arrests, however, will continue.

“We’re still arresting on that charge,” Kenner Police Department Capt. James Gallagher said.

NOPD spokesman Garry Flot said New Orleans police will also continue to make arrests pending a higher court ruling. “Until then, we’ll continue to do what we always do: enforce the law,” he said.

Enforcing the law. How refreshing!