Thread: Change will help Orange, Chatham drivers caught without a license

A new policy in Orange and Chatham counties will allow people charged with driving without a license to get it dismissed if they have a clean criminal and driving record, and can meet other requirements. Scott Sharpe ssharpe@newsobserver.com


ORANGE COUNTY

APRIL 17, 2017 3:40 PM

Change will help Orange, Chatham drivers caught without a license

Y TAMMY GRUBB
tgrubb@newsobserver.com

HILLSBOROUGH

The Orange-Chatham district attorney’s office is giving some drivers a second chance if they are caught without a license in the two counties.

The new policy responds to a state law that bars illegal and undocumented immigrants from getting a driver’s license. Advocates say many unlicensed immigrants risk driving to take their children to school, go to work or be involved in the community.

Getting caught can mean $238 in fines and court fees.

The policy helps a limited number of drivers keep an otherwise clean criminal and driving record, said Orange-Chatham District Attorney Jim Woodall, who drafted the policy with help from law enforcement and immigrant advocates.

The change lets them get the charge dismissed if they provide an ID and pay to take a safe driving class, a civics and law enforcement education class, and an elective course, such as a primer on family or immigration law.

Drivers must have insurance and a car that is registered. Those without or who have multiple or prior charges are not eligible.

“They’re good, responsible residents, they’re not in trouble, they’re working, but they’ve got this problem. They can’t get a driver’s license, there’s no way out of this for them,” Woodall said. “And we’re trying to get them some driver’s education, because virtually none of the people we’re talking about have ever been given any type of driver’s education.”

Orange County Justice United, a nonprofit advocacy group, noted that 7,541 drivers were cited in both counties for driving without a license in the last seven years. Roughly 77 percent were Hispanic, the group found. It’s unclear how many of those faced multiple charges, Woodall said.

But the change will resolve a frustration that judges, prosecutors and law enforcement have felt in trying to help drivers comply with the law, he said. It also builds trust with law enforcement, so immigrants who are victims or witness a crime can come forward with what they know without fear of deportation, he said.

Local law enforcement agencies support the new policy, officials said. A statement from the Orange County Sheriff’s Office noted that the policy does not prevent deputies from enforcing state law.

“I want to send a message to that community that you are a part of our community,” Woodall said. “You may be undocumented, but sometimes we need your help, sometimes you’re going to need our help, and I’m willing to try to do my part ... to promote some goodwill and trust here.”

But the policy only works if the person can be identified, he said. That likely will happen through the local Faith ID program, which gives ID cards to applicants who can prove their country of origin or provide an expired driver’s license, and offer proof of where they live.

The Faith ID is not a driver’s license or government-issued ID card. However, it is threatened by a bill filed by state Sen. Norman Sanderson, of Pamlico County. The bill, in part, would ban such “community IDs,” which Sanderson said mislead law enforcement about someone’s immigration status.

The move comes as the federal government considers withholding law enforcement grants from departments that don’t cooperate with immigration enforcement. While conservative groups have called Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Durham “sanctuary cities” – locales that protect people who are in the country illegally – none have policies that violate state or federal law.

It’s not the Republican Party’s first attempt to stop Faith ID programs, said House Rep. Graig Meyer, an Orange County Democrat who got a Faith ID to show solidarity with immigrants. A 2015 bill failed in its attempt to prevent government and law enforcement officials from accepting community-issued identification documents.

Meyer pointed out, however, that Republican lawmakers are among the biggest proponents of licensing to bolster public safety. A recently filed bill from House Rep. Harry Warren, a Rowan County Republican, would provide immigrants with limited driver’s licenses and ID cards.

Attorneys and others told him the people his office wants to help aren’t the focus of federal conversations, Woodall said.

“These are not criminals. These are average everyday citizens. They are not going to be deported through any policy that anybody’s talked about,” he said. “They’re going to be here for years and years. We have to work with them.”
Tammy Grubb: 919-829-8926, @TammyGrubb







Jim Woodall HARRY LYNCH News & Observer


Read more here: http://www.heraldsun.com/news/local/...#storylink=cpy

Orange and Chatham Counties are illegal alien invasion hot spots along side Durham and Charlotte NC. Orange County is the most liberal in the state because of UNC Chapel Hill and Chatham County is a liberal stronghold that is where Tyson chicken and other meat processing plants have been documented calling up organized crime contacts in Mexico to have shipments of illegal aliens delivered to intentionally replace all their American workers with sub wage illegal workers.

W

Siler City is in Chatham County and is the final resting place of the character Aunt Bee from the Andy Griffith Show. This small rural town is a fine example of how a small rural town can become overrun with illegals and changed forever. This article is 18 years old.

The Miami Herald
January 2, 2000


Hispanic wave forever alters small town in North Carolina

BY ANDRES VIGLUCCI
MIAMI HERALD REPORTER
Photography by Candace West


SILER CITY, N.C. -- The outsiders came first in a trickle, then in a flood, speaking a foreign
tongue, bringing foreign ways and consuming pungently unfamiliar foods.


When as-yet-uncounted numbers of Mexicans and Central Americans descended on tiny Siler
City, they forever altered a sleepy rural burg where the black-and-white population mix had
not changed since Reconstruction.


In a scant six years, Hispanic immigrants drawn by jobs at Siler City's busy chicken
slaughterhouses and textile mills have swollen its official population of 4,500, probably by
several thousand. By conservative estimates, they now make up as much as one-third of
Siler City's population, crowding into its aging neighborhoods, filling its schools, and testing
townfolks' capacity for tolerance and accommodation.


Not incidentally, the immigrants have also helped fuel an economic boom the likes
of which Siler City has not seen since the railroad arrived in the 1880s.


The oldtimers, many of whom liked things just fine the way they were before the
immigrants came, have yet to recover from the shock.


''You know what they call Siler City now?'' a clerk at a farm-equipment store in
town, Joe Langley, inquired good-naturedly of a visitor. ''Little Mexico!''


In sharp contrast is the giddy delight of newcomers who are getting a first taste of
American prosperity. After struggling in California, Wilfredo Hernandez came to
Siler City with his wife and two young daughters at the urging of a cousin.
''I could never dream of buying my own place in Los Angeles,'' said Hernandez,
35, a native of El Salvador who builds trailer homes by day and on weekends
helps his growing Hispanic Baptist congregation erect a sleek new church
building. ''After three years here, I saved enough to buy a mobile home . . . I'm
really happy.''


The story of Siler City's transformation is the story of U.S. immigration at the end
of the 20th Century, writ small.


A 30-year wave of mass immigration, legal and illegal, has brought millions of
newcomers to the country, half or more from Latin America and the Caribbean,
most of those unskilled workers from Mexico.


In search of jobs and better pay, many are pushing out of saturated Texas and California
and into towns in the Old South and the Midwest where immigration was formerly an
abstraction. Some now bypass those traditional entry points, lured by word of mouth
to places they never heard of.


Almost overnight, Hispanics have become the main source of labor for meatpacking
plants in Omaha, Neb., carpet factories in Dalton, Ga., the construction industry in
Atlanta, and poultry plants in Delaware and North Carolina, where they also haul in
the tobacco harvest -- all jobs native-born Americans seem unwilling to fill, at least
at the pay employers seem willing to offer.


Wherever they go, spouses and children in tow, the immigrants' arrival raises
anew the familiar debate over their impact on taxes, schools and services. And as
they settle in, they inevitably upset oldtimers' fixed notions about America.
Nowhere is the trend more dramatically on view than in Siler City, a conservative,
tight-knit town long mistrustful of outsiders -- a category that encompasses not
just poor, Spanish-speaking immigrants, but also Yankees and suspect liberals
from nearby Chapel Hill, home to the University of North Carolina.


Now that immigration has come to Siler City, longtime residents find themselves
caught somewhere between welcome and animosity.


''The sentiment is, 'Send 'em home,' '' said Rick Givens, a Siler City businessman
and chairman of the Chatham County Commission. ''It's old-school, and it's
unfortunate.''


But Givens says his constituents also have a point. Local taxpayers have been
left to absorb a large, unforeseen influx of often-needy people with little outside
help, he said.


Town and county officials have had to hire more police officers, English teachers,
and interpreters for its courts and public health clinics. The county clinics must
absorb the cost of care for some immigrants, many of them undocumented, who
can't pay their bills.


The public outcry prompted Givens last fall to write a letter asking federal
authorities for help in getting undocumented aliens legalized or ''routed back to
their homes.''


And the neophyte commissioner promptly got a stinging first lesson in the politics
of immigration: He was pilloried by some of Siler City's emerging Hispanic
advocates and rebuked by the governor's office for insensitivity.


Givens said he has learned to couch his opinions more diplomatically, but
insists the point of the letter still stands.


''I have eaten a lot of crow. But we're not racists or bigots. We need help,''
Givens said. ''I ran for office to lower my taxes and we ended up passing the
biggest tax increase in years.''


But the complaints are tempered by a dawning realization among many that,
economically and culturally, immigrants have been a boon to what might
otherwise be a dying town.


''They're buying houses like crazy. Business is growing,'' said Holly Kozelsky, 29,
who grew up in Siler City and was working as an interpreter when the town's main
real-estate agency hired her to sell to Hispanics. ''There is a cultural richness and
diversity we didn't have before. Our churches are different, our music is different.
It's changed completely.''


Yet even Kozelsky -- who picked up Spanish working at a local Mexican
restaurant and married a Mexican immigrant -- is not without trepidation.
''The cost is that we're losing our sense of place. A lot of the oldtimers are sad
and feel intimidated,'' she said. ''We're becoming like any other big place. I
prosper from it, but there are parts of it that I hate.''


Just over an hour south of the sprawling Raleigh-Durham metro area and the
high-tech Triangle Research Park, Siler City is solidly Bible Belt. It has also been
Klan territory.


The town's fortunes have long rested on a marriage of agriculture and industry:
feed and cotton mills and, for at least a generation, two plants where locally
raised chickens are slaughtered, sliced and packaged, hard labor with high rates
of injury.


By the early 1990s, though, the town was in decline and losing people, much of
its compact, brick-front downtown boarded up. Since the immigrants' arrival, the
shuttered corner pharmacy and soda fountain, where Kozelskly once sipped
Cherry Cokes, has become Tienda Gabriel, one of several immigrant-owned
downtown stores stocking Latin American foods, Spanish-language videos and
Latin-music CDs.


The big commercial action is out on the Highway 64 corridor that bisects Siler City
and now functions as its main street. New chain motels and fast-food stores are
opening; Wal-Mart has broken ground.


Plumes of steam pour night and day into the sky from the poultry plants, which,
fed by plentiful labor, have expanded and added work shifts. In the surrounding
farmlands, sophisticated automated hatcheries have sprung up to supply the plants.
The economic spillover extends to local makers of furniture and mobile homes
and even the town's AM radio station, WNCA, whose once-sagging ratings
are now buoyed by a nightly Spanish-language show.


Town Manager Joel Brower credits some of the boom to urban sprawl, not
immigration. But like many others, he says the presence of a ready labor pool
and immigrants' demand for goods and housing have doubtlessly accelerated the
wave of development.


''I hate to think what would happen if the immigrants left tomorrow,'' Brower said.
''Our industry would disappear.''


No one is sure how the immigrants found Siler City.


Most likely, Hispanic field workers who had long been migrating through the
South, more or less invisibly, were drawn to the steady jobs at the poultry plants
once they gained legal status under a late-'80s amnesty.


At first, the newcomers were mostly young, single men. As they legalized their
status, many began sending for their families, and by 1994 the influx was
impossible to miss.


Byron Barrera's story is typical. An uncle came to Siler City several years ago for
a poultry plant job. Within a short time, Barrera and 16 relatives from Guatemala
had joined him, most of them also to work at the chicken plants.


''The base for all this is having someone for support,'' said Barrera, 23. ''My uncle
had an apartment, a place where we could stay when we arrived.''


The immigrants find in Siler City plentiful jobs combined with a low cost of living.
Starting pay at the chicken plants can exceed $7 an hour with benefits, a windfall
for immigrants accustomed to scraping by on less and willing to work double
shifts.


Ninett Perez is emblematic of how rapidly some newcomers have adapted. A few
years out of Guatemala, Perez, 31, has parlayed a job inspecting textiles at a
fabric mill into homeownership, and is now hunting for a bigger house for her and
her 9-year-old daughter.


Roberto Vazquez, a Salvadoran generally acknowledged to be the town's first
immigrant, preceded the influx by a good 15 years, having wound up in Siler City
after running out of money while on his way to Washington, D.C. But he, too, has
benefited: He brought his four brothers to live and work in Siler City.


''I have my job, my own home, my children,'' said Vazquez, 48, who has worked
at the local Food Lion supermarket for 22 years and preaches at a small Hispanic
Christian church. ''I want for nothing, and I live a peaceful life.''


Longtime residents, however, have tended to focus on the less-positive aspects of
the influx, especially at first, when the benefits were hard to see. The first source
of friction was fundamental: For most Siler City residents, communication with
their new neighbors, many of whom spoke little or no English, was impossible.
Donna Weaver, a Siler City native, went away to college in 1985, when
there were virtually no immigrants in town.


''I came back and they were here,'' said Weaver, who later studied Spanish
and is now an interpreter at a private medical clinic. ''I didn't like it at first. I
didn't understand why they were here.''


Police were soon flooded with complaints about immigrants blasting music
late at night and about rowdy, drunk young men. Cops found themselves
grappling with the tendency of some newcomers to drive without licenses
or insurance, sometimes under the effects of alcohol, sometimes with tragic
consequences.


Along with the legal immigrants have come the undocumented, prompting a
flourishing trade in fraudulent documentation and phony immigration ''experts'' who
cheat naive newcomers.


While countless immigrants have bought mobile homes and houses, many newly
built, others are stuck in dilapidated housing, crammed into tumbledown frame
houses or sagging trailers for which landlords charge exorbitant monthly rents,
sometimes $100 a head.


As some locals see it, some immigrants also brought a little too much Los
Angeles to Siler City. A small but visible criminal element has arrived, quickly
taking its place in the local drug trade, which predated the Hispanic influx.
''Within the past two or three years, we started getting Hispanics busted with
kilos of coke worth a quarter million in their car,'' said Mitch Million, a veteran
bilingual teacher who also interprets in local courts. ''That didn't use to happen.''
Open confrontations between longtime residents and immigrants have been rare,
however. Locals' resentment has instead played out behind closed doors or in
conversations among neighbors, especially when Hispanics began buying houses
in town.


''A woman up the block from us sold her house to a Mexican family and the
neighbor chewed her out for it,'' said Donna Weaver, relating a commonplace
anecdote.


When she married a Mexican man, Weaver became herself the object of
intolerance. From members of her own family.


''I hung up the phone after an argument with my Dad and I thought, 'My Dad's
Archie Bunker,' '' recalled Weaver. ''My husband and I weren't allowed to have
Thanksgiving dinner with the family for two years.''


Nor have relations been cordial between newcomers and Siler City's black
community, once about a quarter of the town's population. Many blacks regard
the immigrants as competitors for housing, jobs and limited social services and
medical care once focused mainly on blacks.


''We were already down, and now we're even further behind,'' said the Rev. Barry
Gray, pastor of the 300-member First Missionary Baptist Church of Siler City.
''Latinos have rented and are steadily buying a lot of property. They have cash
money, they have good credit, they're a good liability. People cater to them. But it
has made housing skyrocket.''


Racial tensions flared briefly when muggers, some of them black, began targeting
immigrants, who, lacking bank accounts, were known to carry around wads of
cash. When a Hispanic man shot and killed a black man in an argument,
anonymous threats were phoned to people with Spanish surnames picked out of
the phone book.


Those tensions have since abated, though, and blacks and Hispanics recently
found themselves allied in attacking one of the touchiest flash points over
immigration in Siler City -- apparent white flight from the town's only public grade
school.


In just three years, Hispanic kids have overtaken white children as the largest
group in Siler City Elementary, where swelling enrollment has forced
administrators to install trailers and shift fifth graders to a new middle school.
Hispanics now make up a full third of the 670-student school's enrollment, in part
because some white parents have pulled their children out, said Paul Joyce,
assistant superintendent of county schools.


The bright, immaculate school would be the envy of many communities, but some
white parents complain that teachers spend too much time helping students who
are not proficient in English at the expense of their children.


At a fall meeting, school board members became the target of angry complaints
from both black and Hispanic parents, who blamed them for doing nothing to stop
white children from transferring across district lines.

''The school board was letting it happen,'' said T.C. Yarborough, a detective in the
county sheriff's department and president of the school PTA, who is white and
suggests that concern over their children's education is not the only motive for the
transfers. ''I heard from other parents, 'My child is the only white child in the
classroom.' ''

The school controversy is only the latest example of how the town's institutions,
treading their way gingerly between longtime residents' sensibilities and
immigrants' needs, have struggled to respond.

The town produced a well-intentioned Spanish-language video and brochure
designed to instruct newcomers on how to be American, but that implied instead
that Hispanic men abuse alcohol and beat their spouses. Rueful town officials
blamed a poor translation.

Immigrants and advocates have complained of harassment by police, who set up
driver's license checkpoints at the entrance to trailer parks where they live, by the
Catholic Church after Mass, and by the poultry plants at shift change. The town
has also been reluctant to crack down on exploitative landlords, advocates say.
In the absence of decisive official action, churches and private groups have formed
the backbone of Siler City's efforts to absorb the newcomers, with varying degrees
of success.

Most of the mainline churches have adopted Spanish-speaking congregations,
helping them become independent once they are ready to stand alone. The
churches have been one of the few bridges connecting newcomers and oldtimers.
After years within the fold of Loves Creek Baptist Church, the Rev. Israel Tapia's
60-member congregation is constructing a new church, with help from
non-Hispanic members who pitched in with labor and donations.

The local United Way hired Ilana Dubester, a Spanish-speaking Brazilian
immigrant, to run a service and advocacy group. Now independent, Hispanic
Liaison counsels immigrants on everything from obtaining driver's licenses to
home buying.

But it's all patchwork, and insufficient, said Bill Lail, director of the Family
Resource Center, a nonprofit spinoff of the county health department that provides
counseling, child care and immigration services to immigrants.

The bottom line, residents and newcomers said, is that Siler City is for now three
separate communities whose members rarely mix outside work.

But there is also reason for hope: At Siler City elementary, most of the
immigrants' children pick up English with ease, administrators say. After
Commissioner Givens issued his letter of complaint, he and other local leaders
tapped Pastor Tapia to organize a forthcoming trip to Mexico, where they hope to
get a feel for where the newcomers are coming from.

''By sheer numbers, it seems inevitable that something has to give. It's already
giving, in a way,'' said Dubester. ''Both sides are learning how to live with each
other.''

The clearest evidence may rest in one oldtimer's change of heart -- Donna
Weaver's father. ''He's coming around,'' she said. ''He just called to ask what my
husband wanted for Christmas.''


Copyright 1999 Miami Herald

http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/...h-carolina.htm

Prime example of how big businesses & cheap labor have influenced & allowed our country to be overtaken w/o a sword or rifle raised - Jeff Sessions says that is over - we have laws, you have a valid work visa or you are heading back to your country. All illegals are connected to drug cartels aka "filth" that will not be tolerated anymore in the USA.