About 850,000 New Yorkers have the city’s IDNYC card. Most of them are unlawful immigrants. The card was supposed to make working and living in the city easier, but it also centralized the addresses, names and other information of many unlawful immigrants in an encrypted NYC database. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio suggested the day after Trump’s election the database could be “scrubbed” to protect the individuals in it.
What is he waiting for?
This should produce deja vu. Politically unpopular and minority communities have long had good reason to fear government registration efforts. In the 1950s, the state of Alabama tried to force the NAACP to turn its membership lists over to the government. The NAACP refused, and eventually won in the Supreme Court. The court cited “the vital relationship between freedom to associate and privacy in one’s associations,” when it ruled that revealing the NAACP’s membership lists would impermissibly infringe on the members’ constitutional rights.
The war on terror has created similar registration fears in the Muslim community, which has been subjected to extensive surveillance and data basing efforts.
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