Volunteers help immigrants wary of deportations

Antonia Catalan maneuvers her gray sport utility vehicle around potholes in the dirt roads where rural South Florida meets the swampy Everglades.

Immigration law experts say volunteering to help immigrants already in the country illegally is generally not against the law, but Trump has raised doubts by ordering rules to penalize people who “facilitate their presence” in the U.S. Conservative critics say these kinds of volunteers should be punished along with the immigrants they are helping.

California, Illinois, Washington and Maryland are among the states that issue driver’s licenses to undocumented migrants, but not Florida, where staying out of trouble by driving carefully is a strategy migrants can’t count on.



Since Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez agreed in January to hold people in jail for even minor offenses if Immigration and Customs Enforcement wants to pick them up, six people arrested on a single charge of driving without a valid license have been turned over to ICE.