As Perth Amboy, NJ Issues Municipal ID, Immigrant Concerns Remain

Starting on Monday, March 14, the city of Perth Amboy, led by its mayor, Puerto Rican-born Wilda Díaz, will begin distributing municipal identification cards to all residents who apply to receive one.

The municipal ID program will allow residents 14 years and older who have no other documentation to access services offered by local, governmental and affiliated institutions.

The cost of the identification card is $20. Minors and older adults will pay $7.

The document will benefit people who lack legal residency in the United States as well as war veterans, the elderly, homeless people and others who, for one reason or another, do not possess identity documents.

The city has established a permanent office at 339 Reade St. ‒ home to the Perth Amboy Gallery Center for the Arts ‒ where the document will be issued.

The announcement has provoked mixed reactions among the community.

To Alicia Irineo, secretary at the Mexican Association of Perth Amboy, the ID has a positive and a negative side.

“Surely the mayor has good intentions. While she gets a new source of revenue for the city, she is offering people a document that certifies that they are Perth Amboy residents,” said Irineo, born in Mexico. “But we still don’t know if with the next mayor, or under a Donald Trump administration, the city would be forced to submit the personal information of undocumented immigrants to immigration authorities, which would put families in danger,” she said in a concerned tone.

Irineo said that, between October and November 2015, the family of a Mexican Perth Amboy resident who died had to deal with the police when the authorities refused to recognize the man’s Mexican passport as valid identification. The incident brought to light the problems caused by the lack of identification among undocumented people.

“I think that, aside from issuing an ID, the police need more training. We have seen cases of domestic violence in which the first thing they ask from the victim when she arrives at the police station is to show a social security card. It makes no sense to have an ID if the police are not trained on how to deal with people,” said Irineo.

Perth Amboy is one of the cities with the largest number of Latinos in Middlesex County, New Jersey. Of a population of 50,000, 78 percent are Latino, with a strong presence of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Mexicans, Salvadorans and Peruvians, among others.

The city is the fourth one in the state to approve municipal IDs. The first three were Newark, Roselle and Plainfield.

The city of Passaic has also announced plans to issue municipal IDs, and residents and community organizations in Elizabeth have started a campaign to do the same.

So far, the largest response to the program has been seen in Newark, where more than 4,000 IDs have been issued. The city’s residents who had no other way to identify themselves are now able to show a document and even to start businesses thanks to the existence of the card.