Spanish speakers learn strategies to pass English-only driving test in Florida

The DOT says it wants to make trucking safer, but some see an 'immigration raid'

Florida long allowed drivers like López to take written tests in Spanish. Now in line with President Trump's hardline stance on immigration, Republican-led Florida in February began requiring written and oral tests for new drivers only in English, without translator assistance.

López's struggle illustrates new barriers facing aspiring drivers under the rule change, particularly in heavily Hispanic cities such as Miami and Orlando.

The measure makes Florida one of only a handful of states to require English-only driving tests – and by far the largest and most diverse. Roughly one in three Floridians speak a foreign-language at home, according to U.S. Census data.

The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles instituted the rule less than a year after a commercial truck driver making an illegal U-turn killed three people on the Florida Turnpike. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) praised the rule as a "good reform."

The Trump administration and Republicans leaders in the state have highlighted the case as evidence immigrant truckers with limited English skills pose a threat on roads.

"If you don't know what road signs are saying, you're more likely to get into a car accident that puts all of us in peril," said Florida House Rep. Berny Jacques (R-Seminole), who supports the requirement.

Jacques, who was born in Haiti, noted that Floridians voted in 1988 to make English the state's official language. The new driving test rule, he said, will push immigrants to assimilate.

"It's easy to get comfortable when you have a situation where there's a lot of people from your own community, you can go throughout a whole lifetime, going about and transacting business without ever speaking English," Jacques said.

Critics insist that the move unfairly targets Hispanic and other minority groups – and that no data exists to show drivers who lack English proficiency are more dangerous.

The English-only tests will push people to drive without licenses in a state with lousy public transportation, said Adriana Rivera, a spokeswoman for the Florida Immigrant Coalition.

"We're going to create a class of people that are going to be criminalized for something as simple as picking up a prescription," Rivera said.

The policy will hurt Orlando's large Puerto Rican population, some of whom may have limited English proficiency, she said.

Perhaps nowhere in the state is as affected by the new rule as Miami-Dade County, which is majority Hispanic. Spanish is widely spoken, as is Haitian Creole. The rule went fully into effect in April.

English-only requirements have history in Florida

Debate over language – and what it means to be American – is nothing new in Miami.

When Cuban refugees flooded Miami in 1980 after the Mariel boatlift, the county passed a controversial ordinance that largely banned the use of taxpayer money for programs conducted in languages besides English.

Miami Cuban-American leaders such as Manny Díaz successfully pushed to repeal the law in the early 1990s. Díaz, who later became the mayor of Miami and chair of the Florida Democratic Party, said he is disappointed in the state's new English-only requirement for driver's tests.

"My first thought was, 'My God, I thought we were done with this,'" Díaz said.

Miami-Dade County has thrived precisely because of its many languages and the new rule was an unnecessary product of Republican fearmongering, he said.

"It's just making life difficult unnecessarily for people," Díaz said.

That's clear at Speedway Driving School, which caters to Latin American immigrants who have moved to the United States and need to drive for work, ferry their kids to school or grocery shop. It's in Hialeah, a sprawling and traffic-choked city populated by mostly Cuban Americans. In Miami-Dade, there are many schools like this.

Memorization and keywords help non-English speakers

On a recent Saturday, eight students crammed into a tiny classroom with road signs adorning the walls. Their stories represented a microcosm of the Miami experience. One man moved from Colombia two weeks ago.

Another student, Yaima Fuentes Pérez, 41, came from Cuba a little more than a year ago and was granted her green card just after the English-only rule came into effect. A former journalist in Cuba, Fuentes said she needed her license to attend accounting classes.

She wished she could take the test in Spanish.

"I understand I live in the United States and English is the dominant language – but I also understand there are many Latinos who live in this country, especially in Florida," she said in Spanish.

Johannes González, an instructor at Speedway Driving School in Hialeah, Florida, teaches Spanish-speaking students to memorize key words in order to pass the state's new English-only driving exam. David Ovalle/NPR

David Ovalle/NPR

During the class, instructor Johannes González employed re-designed lessons he'd been working on for months. He knows he can't teach English fluency in a series of short classes. Instead, he teaches mostly in Spanish but focuses on getting students to memorize key English words and how they may appear on the test.

González pulled up a Power Point with sample questions and charts. Many English words share Latin roots with those in Spanish, he reminded them. Velocity. Velocidad. Pedestrian. Peatón.

"Maximum highway speed, right? Seventy miles an hour. Te lo pongo en inglés, es más o menos igual. Maximum," he said, explaining in a Miami blend of Spanglish.

Classes run longer now. More students fail the exam on the first attempt, González said, so the school charges them a flat fee so they can attend as many classes as needed.

Students over the age of 50, in particular, are struggling with lessons, he said. Yuri Rodríguez, the school's owner, said fewer students are enrolling. "Everyone is afraid they won't pass the exam," she said.

On this Saturday, students saw mixed results. After weeks of study, Fuentes breezed through the written test, missing just one answer.

López, the construction worker originally from Guatemala, failed for the second time. He's back to studying.