When a moving violation turns into a violation of civil rights

Frank Cerabino

Driving records are being used in Florida to deport some people and keep others from getting their voting rights restored.

Take what’s happening in Collier County these days. That Southwest Florida county was one of 37 in 16 states that partnered with the U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement in something called the 287(g) program, which trains and authorizes some local law enforcement officers “to perform certain functions of an immigration officer.”

The agreement put selected jailhouse deputies in the Collier County Sheriff ’s Office through a four-week training program with the federal agency to help ICE single out county inmates for deporta- tion.

So how has that been working out?

The county has started shipping dozens of inmates from its jail to the federal Krome Detention Center in Miami-Dade County. The Naples Daily News examined the cases of all those former county-jail inmates put on the path to deportation since President Donald Trump’s executive order calling for more deportations.

“Three-fourths of those cases alleged only misdemeanor traffic offenses, such as driving with no valid license, driving with an expired license or driving with a suspended license, according to arrest records,” the newspaper reported. “Only three were for alleged felonies, and charges in two of those cases were dropped, and reduced to a misdemeanor in the third, court records show.”

Hardly the “bad hombres” we’ve been hearing so much about.

The other group of Floridians who are finding out the drastic consequences of traffic infractions are felons who have served their time and are trying to get their voting rights restored.

There are more than 1.68 million felons in Florida who are eligible to have their voting rights restored, but have not had those rights restored. Or to put it another way, one of every four felons yet to have his or her voting rights restored in America is a Floridian.

Florida, Kentucky and Iowa are the only three states that have established a lifetime ban on voting for all felons, who can only restore their rights by petitioning for a hearing before the state’s Executive Clemency Board, which is made up of the governor, the state attorney general, the commissioner of agriculture and consumer services, and the state’s chief financial officer.

That’s in contrast to 14 states that automatically re-establish voting rights as soon as the felon is released from prison. Twenty other states restore voting rights when the sen-