San Jose Changes Towing Policies, But Checkpoints Are the Real Fear For Undocumented Drivers

The City of San Jose has taken a step in the right direction to help reduce the fear us undocumented people have. San Jose will no longer tow our car away when making a routine traffic stop, they will let us park the car or have someone with a license pick it up. This is a good feeling, to know that the City is willing to start backing you up. But state law still makes the city tow cars in sobriety checkpoints. The next step for the City of San Jose to take to protect our immigrant communities is to revise policies around these sobriety checkpoints, which seems to be more about targeting undocumented immigrants then dealing with drunk drivers.

As an undocumented immigrant that needs to drive for work and school, I can say in all certainty that it is the checkpoints that are causing the most fear in our communities.

When I'm driving I always stay alert, especially during slow moving traffic since it usually means there is a checkpoint up ahead. If I come home late I tend to avoid streets that I know had previously had sobriety checkpoints. I don't fear the checkpoints for what they are intended for, I applaud the efforts the police are taking to get drunk drivers off the streets. Every time there is a sobriety checkpoint in my neighborhood though, it ends up that the majority of the cars towed were not for drunk driving but for undocumented drivers.

My South Bay apartments has the feel of a vecindad, a vecindad is a Spanish word we used in Mexico for an apartment complex where everyone is like family. So in my tight nit neighborhood, news travels fast. The majority of us are undocumented. The ones that aren't, are cool with being lookouts and hood investigators. If there is word going around the neighborhood of a checkpoint, the hood investigators drive to the area and check out the validity of the rumor. When they go out to check, once they find out if its true or not they send a mass text message to their family, and their family texts their friends and so on. 

As much as it's a close knit community, we are still undocumented. The most recent scare I had occurred on New Year's. I spent New Year's at my cousin's house and didn't drink because I had to work the next day at 6 a.m. At around 3 a.m. I decided to go home. I had cousins (who are also undocumented) visiting me from Tierra Bella, a small town close to Bakersfield. I took them home with me and during the drive they were more worried than I was. My cousins parents have scared them as a way to have them always stay aware and conscious of their legal status, just like my parents did to me at a young age. I felt like I was getting interrogated by my cousins on what to do if I get caught driving while undocumented. Not wanting to worry them, I told them that I would just take the back streets and avoid the checkpoints. But I was lying. We encountered no checkpoints but you could tell they were scared. It was a long silent car ride.

To me, the checkpoints seem to be a front for the City to make money through citations, and the lucky tow truck company that gets called to rob immigrants of super hard earned money. Out of all the undocumented people I know, about 10% of them don't have insurance or their car registered, everyone else complies with the law to the max of their ability. We do this only because according to the law we weren't allowed to get drivers licenses to begin with. So if we do get pulled over, the citations won't pile up, since we are good with insurance and registration.

I had an argument with a lady one day about the checkpoints. Her stance was that it’s a good idea to take unlicensed drivers off the streets because they are a danger to other drivers. But people who drive while undocumented have a lot on the line for driving. That's why we are the safest drivers on the road. When we get in accidents no matter whose fault it is, it always falls back on us for not having a license. That's why we try to drive as safe as possible. The sobriety checkpoints should be just what they are meant to be — sobriety checkpoints. They should just take cars from people who are driving drunk.

I applaud the City of San Jose for changing its policies around towing for stops, but the next step has to be changing policies around the cause of a deeper fear – checkpoints.