Illinois’ secretary of state is pursuing legislation to codify the office’s long-held policy of not giving federal agencies full access to its database of driver’s license photographs as a means to identify someone’s legal status, a spokesperson said Monday. That initiative is one Jesse White has employed since 2013, when the state created an avenue for “undocumented” immigrants to obtain a temporary visitor’s driver’s license. Officials from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Federal Bureau of Investigation reportedly used facial recognition technology to comb through the driver’s license identification databases of several states last week, including Utah, Vermont and Washington.
