Alicia A. has lived in Georgia for 8 years. She is the mother of a young child, a worker and active in the struggle for immigrant rights. Alicia has been a victim of racial profiling; now she feels threatened whenever she takes her daughter to the hospital or even to school.
Since anti-immigration laws have been passed, the police have placed checkpoints along roads in immigrant communities. Her daughter suffers from a serious medical condition where she has convulsions in her sleep. She doesn't know when it can happen and has driven without a license to take her daughter to the hospital many times. One day, two years ago, she was stopped at a police checkpoint on her way to the pediatric hospital with her daughter who had a high fever and pneumonia. She tried to reason with the police officer, since he spoke Spanish, to let her through. He told Alicia that she had to wait in line so that they could check every car. She waited thirty minutes, with her sick daughter, and was then told she would be arrested for driving without a driver’s license. A woman walking by offered to drive her car and take them to the hospital, another police officer was there and they let Alicia and her daughter go. She stopped driving after that. HB87 will make this worse.
The second time she was stopped it was by a police officer who was following her. When she asked what she had done, he told her that she looked suspicious. He let her go. She feels extremely fortunate because she wasn't detained but she can't risk driving any longer. This makes many things more difficult. When she walks to school with her daughter, she sees the same police officer every day waiting to stop other mothers taking their children to school. She will keep fighting against these unjust laws. It is not right that a mother cannot take her children to school or hospital without fear of being arrested and separated from her family.