DMV becomes a roadblock for U.S. citizens born overseas


Tuesday, Sep 16, 2008
Mon, Sep. 15, 2008 10:15 PM
By MALCOLM GARCIA
The Kansas City Star

Allison Long
At her home in Blue Springs, Audrey Barbarick held some of the paperwork she must complete to keep her driver’s license. Barbarick was born in England, lived there for five months and then moved with her family to Missouri, where she has lived for 53 years. She now must jump through hoops to follow laws created in the past few years. Except for the first five months of her infancy, Audrey Barbarick has lived all of her life in Missouri.

Her mother was born on the island of Malta in the Mediterranean Sea. In 1952, she met Barbarick’s father there at a Thanksgiving dinner. He was in the U.S. Navy. They married in England in 1954. Barbarick and her twin sister were born in 1956 in a London hospital. Five months later, the family moved to Missouri, and her mother became a citizen in 1961.

Barbarick, 53, grew up in Pleasant Hill, her father’s hometown. She now lives in Blue Springs and works at the Community Blood Center. As a child, she helped out in her uncle’s grocery store and listened with her mother to the Beatles. Later, she married her high school sweetheart and had three children, one of whom served in Iraq at the start of the war. She held jobs and performed the mundane tasks of everyday life, paid her taxes, took care of the bills and every few years renewed her driver’s license.

It was during a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles’ Harrisonville office in 2005 that she realized she could not prove her U.S. citizenship as required by the Real ID Act signed by President Bush that year. The act imposes certain security and authentication standards for state driver’s licenses and state ID cards in order for them to be accepted by the federal government for “official purposes,â€