Big "Oh, Brother!"

George Orwell was obviously a man ahead of his time. Instead of "1984", his story of a totalitarian state controlling every aspect of life should really be titled "2005".

How a license check can become a trapdoor

By Nina Bernstein
The New York Times

Congress is still a few days away from establishing sweeping federal requirements for a driver's license, including proof that an applicant's presence in the United States is legal. But as Jorge Medina-González discovered late last year when he drove to the store for a can of paint, in places like Nutley, New Jersey, the rules of the road have already changed.

Medina, 42, was close to home when two Nutley police officers stopped his Jeep Cherokee because of a broken taillight. They asked for his license and registration, then his Social Security number. In the few minutes it took them to search a national database in a curbside version of the kind of checks that Congress is about to require nationwide, the American life Medina had built over 13 years began to crumble.

Like many of the estimated 10 million illegal residents in the United States, Medina - who came here in 1991 to escape poverty and political violence in his native Guatemala - has repeatedly tried to legalize his status through shifting rules set by Congress, and the delays of an overwhelmed immigration system. He stood before the police as a taxpaying Nutley homeowner with no criminal record, the father of two U.S. citizens, and a cook at a New York catering company that was sponsoring him for a green card.

But the computer search came back with a single message: Immigration authorities, at one point, had ordered him deported. His driver's license became a one-way ticket to immigration jail, where he remains.

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