The Independent View: Judge Rules NYC Should Keep ID Data for Now

A key component of New York City’s inclusive approach to immigrants under Mayor Bill de Blasio was on trial in a Staten Island Courtroom yesterday.

In the first arguments in a lawsuit filed this month by Ronald Castorina Jr. and Nicole Malliotakis, Republican members of the State Assembly from Staten Island, their lawyer, Jeff Alfano, said the City should be barred from destroying records associated with its Municipal Identification program, known as IDNYC.

In the nearly two years of the program, the IDNYC card has been particularly popular with undocumented immigrants because it is a Government-issued form of Photo Identification available to those who lack Social Security cards or Driver’s Licenses. As prescribed by City law, records containing the personal data of the roughly one million people who have applied for the IDs were set to be destroyed by Dec. 31.

But on Wednesday, Justice Philip G. Minardo of State Supreme Court on Staten Island delayed that destruction until a full hearing could be convened in the first week of January, preferably with Mr. de Blasio or Melissa Mark-Viverito, the City Council speaker, present. “I don’t want to order the mayor or the council speaker to be here, but it would be helpful,” Justice Minardo said, issuing an unusual request.

Mr. Castorina and Ms. Malliotakis said on Wednesday that they welcomed the Judge’s ruling as a small victory, an acknowledgment by the Court that there were “issues” with destroying the documents. In their suit, they said that destroying the records would threaten National Security and that the data should be preserved and made accessible under New York State’s Freedom of Information law.

Lawyers for the City argued that the State law did not cover the release of such private data. The City said on Dec. 7th that it would stop keeping personal data after new applications were approved starting next year.

Justice Minardo denied a separate request to stop the destruction of the new documents being collected, at least until there could be a full hearing.

While officials and lawyers wrangled over the program, cardholders and Immigrant Advocates said they feared that President-Elect Donald J. Trump’s Administration could use the data if it moved to deport any of the estimated 11 million unauthorized residents of the Country.

The ID cards allow registration in public schools, are accepted by the New York Police Department as a form of identification for people reporting crimes and grant free admission to museums. The IDs have also been popular with some of New York’s most vulnerable residents: those living in homeless shelters, victims of domestic violence, and transgender people.

“Our credibility is at stake with the immigrant communities that we work with,” said Manny Castro, Executive Director of New Immigrant Community Empowerment, which works with day laborers in Queens. He added: “If something were to happen with this data that led to a family getting detained or deported, then how are immigrants supposed to believe the city when it comes to providing information to the police or public schools? It took decades for the city to build this credibility.”

According to the City, more than half of cardholders use the IDs as their primary form of identification. Since the program’s inception and somewhat rocky start, the City has issued 988,066 cards.

The application does not ask applicants their immigration status. To obtain a card, an applicant can, for example, use a valid Foreign passport or a Consular identification, along with a utility bill that verifies a City address. An expired Foreign passport is acceptable for up to three years, but the applicant may require two additional forms of proof. In addition, proof of residency in a homeless shelter for 15 days can be a form of identification.

Mr. Castorina said he became alarmed in September when New York State’s Banking Superintendent encouraged all State-licensed Banks and Credit Unions to accept IDNYC. Only 13 banks in New York City accept the ID, and Mayor de Blasio's Administration had pushed the Superintendent to make such a recommendation to expand access to Financial Services for undocumented immigrants. “It raised concern that a person with nefarious intent or a criminal enterprise could utilize this ID to finance terror or engage in fraud,” Mr. Castorina said. He and Ms. Malliotakis, the only Republicans from the City in the Assembly, sit on the Chamber’s Banking Committee.

Under the law that created the ID program, which was negotiated with the Police Department, records of the documents used to apply were to be kept for two years and made available only through a Judicial Subpoena.

According to City records, the program had released information on only seven cardholders in response to Judicial requests through Sept. 30th. A total of 92 applications for IDs had been flagged as highly likely to be fraudulent, and the City had denied 7,130 applications over all because of insufficient proof of identification.

At the Lower East Side People’s Federal Credit Union in Manhattan, the same types of identification that can be used to apply for the IDNYC program are accepted for opening accounts. That made it easier for the Credit Union to trust the City’s vetting process, said Alicia Portada, the Institution’s Marketing Director. “It is not a concern if they keep the records for one year, three years or not at all,” she said. “As long as they have confirmed eligibility, then that is enough for us.”

Nisha Agarwal, the City’s Immigrant Affairs Commissioner, said officials were confident in the strength of the program’s internal vetting process. Revising the policy to purge personal information immediately, she said, “shows a commitment to protecting people’s information and moving forward.”

Mr. Castorina insisted that the lawsuit was “not about immigration.”

Ms. Malliotakis, a child of Cuban and Greek immigrants, said that the records should be kept for the five years that an IDNYC card was valid and that she opposed purging records that could be useful in cases of fraud or money laundering. She said she was not aware of any such cases. Before filing their suit, Ms. Malliotakis and Mr. Castorina filed a Freedom of Information request in November to obtain the records for all IDNYC cardholders, which the City denied.

Lawyers for the City called the suit a “last-minute ploy to nullify a legislative directive and eviscerate” the City’s promise to protect applicants’ privacy. The State’s Freedom of Information law, the City’s lawyers said, did not grant wide public access to the information of private individuals.

On Tuesday, the State Attorney General, Eric T. Schneiderman, submitted an Amicus Brief in support of the City, urging that State Freedom of Information requests “not become a mechanism for undermining governmental pledges of confidentiality.”

Yet nobody knows how strongly the Trump Administration might try to pursue the information, said Steven Choi, Executive Director of the New York Immigration Coalition. “That’s the wild card,” he said. “Are they going to utilize the entire muscle of the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security to try to get this information? I think that would be a ridiculous waste of time and a terribly corrosive message to the entire country.”