A woman with a FaithAction ID. CREDIT: FaithAction “It’s just plain common sense that cities and counties ought to be enforcing federal and state immigration laws and not harboring illegal aliens at the potential expense of their own citizens’ safety,” the statement read. “Hopefully this bill will provide some extra incentive for local officials to do the right thing.” But supporters of the ID program say it was created in partnership with law enforcement officials precisely because police wanted to make cities safer — and that destroying it will only damage hard-earned trust between immigrants and officers. The initiative was launched three years ago in Greensboro, North Carolina, when local advocacy organization FaithAction International House realized that undocumented immigrants were afraid to call the police when crimes occurred, fearing officers would arrest them instead because they lacked identification. The group convened a series of conversations between immigrant community leaders and police representatives to explore how to address the problem, but the discussion kept circling back to the same issue: immigrants didn’t trust police because they asked for ID, and police didn’t trust immigrants because they couldn’t identify them. The issue of unreported crimes is alarmingly common within undocumented immigrant communities., 70 percent of undocumented Latino immigrants said they would neither file a police report as a victim nor list themselves as a witness to a crime out of fear of deportation. Undocumented Immigrants Drivers LicenseLicense For Illegal Immigrants In NcMar 25, 2013 North Carolina debuted new driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants Monday. ![]() North Carolina Drivers License For Illegal Immigrants 2015And have addressed this concern by creating city-specific ID systems, printing cards that do not carry the same legal weight as driver’s licenses or federal IDs but do assist police and help cardholders access city services. But these programs are often too expensive for smaller towns to replicate, prompting FaithAction Executive Director Rev. David Fraccaro to brainstorm another option: encourage faith communities — which are already trusted by law enforcement — to issue IDs instead. “A lot of immigrants who were victims of crimes who were afraid to call law enforcement, which is bad for the entire city — people are committing crimes and getting away with it,” he said.
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