Activist Groups Fighting Driver License Law

Various Latino activist groups are fighting the law that requires drivers to be legally licensed or else lose their cars to impound:

A controversial police technique to remove unlicensed drivers from the roads is being challenged on civil rights grounds, and another federal court decision is expected soon, it was reported today.

Police across California are using temporary roadblocks to find unlicensed drivers, and impound their cars. But Latino rights groups say that practice is discriminatory and aimed at undocumented workers, who are unable to pay for their cars' steep impound fees.

Los Angeles and Orange counties have joined several other agencies in supporting a state law that requires cars driven by unlicensed or uninsured motorists to be impounded on the spot, and towed to a storage yard.

I got stuck in one of these temporary roadblocks in Escondido awhile back. I had no problem since I had a valid license with me, though it did cost me about 20 minutes. For 24 other drivers that day, their cars were impounded. Escondido is a pretty heavily Hispanic city, so the activists would surely consider that some form of harrassment against illegal aliens.

I have no problem with the impounding of cars due to license violations, though at times I think the cities carry out these raids not so much to keep the roads safe but to generate revenue from fines and fees. I am not a fan of forfeiture laws where the State can sieze your vehicle and sell it and keep the proceeds because of the violation of laws unrelated to the operation of the vehicle, such as in prostitution stings or drug violations. I don't think people should be free to solicit prostitutes or commit drug violations, but the punishment should fit the crime and seizing a person's car over those types of violations is in my view excessive.

I don't believe the activists in the case above will be successful in their suit, though the Ninth Circus Court of Appeals has already warned cops that they don't like the procedure:

But recent decisions by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals have prompted a statewide association of police chiefs to warn its members that impounding cars merely because the driver is unlicensed is an unconstitutional seizure under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The Ninth Circus is the most overturned court in the land, so it's hard to say how the Supremes would feel about these laws. If you're not going to let the unlicensed driver continue the trip in his car, the car has to go somewhere and impounding is the easiest solution for law enforcement rather than having cops waiting around for a licensed driver to show up and remove the vehicle.