On Saturday, December 1, 2018, Voces De La Frontera held a meeting open to the public at Allen Field Elementary School regarding their fight for restoring undocumented people’s drivers’ licenses in Wisconsin.
The meeting opened with Voces member, Ramiro, thanking the audience for coming out on a Saturday, and lightly reminded everyone to become a member of Voces De La Frontera if they hadn’t already.
“We need your help to continue our fight,” he urged.
Voces Operations Director, Nancy Flores, then took over, promptly welcoming everyone again, encouraging all in attendance to become members of Voces. She began with a map of the United States, explaining that green states on the map had authorized drivers’ licenses for immigrants. Wisconsin was among the non-green states on the map, which were the states yet to authorize similar licenses.
“The goal of this campaign is to turn the state of Wisconsin green,” said O.D. Flores. She then began to go over the process for Wisconsin to become a green state.
“If the bill passes the House and the Senate, it will be given to the governor. There, he has the power to veto or approve it and sign the bill. Then it will become a law,” she explained.
“That is the process that is much easier said than done,” she laughed and immediately opened the floor to Voces’s Executive Director, Christine Neumann-Ortiz.
“Now, after years of fighting, we can count on support from the Democrats,” said Neumann-Ortiz. “We’re going to need 15 Republicans,” she explained, saying that, in order to give immigrants driver’s licenses in Wisconsin, we would need 15 Republicans from the state Assembly.
She made reference to their last meeting they had about the licenses. After realizing that few audience members had attended their last meeting, Neumann-Ortiz quickly summarized what they had spoken on.
“What we agreed upon was that we are going to prioritize this and try to include it in the state budget,” she said.
It was also agreed upon in the last meeting that written letters to Governor-elect, Tony Evers, and other legislators will also be in the works. Voces is also going to try and coordinate a welcoming party for Evers in Madison during his inauguration on Jan. 7. The idea is not to protest but to prioritize drivers’ licenses for undocumented people and stay positive because Voces believes the new Governor-elect will support this action.
She then opened the floor to lawyer Michelle Velasquez, who explained what could happen if someone undocumented were to be stopped with an expired license and gave examples of different scenarios. Nancy Flores returned and split everyone in the audience into groups. Each group was asked to brainstorm what they believed Voces’ next steps should be in regards to the drivers’ licenses. After about 15 minutes, each group was asked to choose a representative to share their ideas. Everything from writing letters to planning the next Day Without Latinos were amongst everyone’s ideas. The feeling of solidarity filled the room quickly. After the last representative spoke, everyone applauded and welcomed Nancy Flores back again, offering pamphlets with more information. Finally, Christine asked one person from each table to describe how the meeting made them feel. Some found it difficult to only use one word.
“With much hope,” expressed an audience member.