Swedish-born Elsi Kathan, 86, has a problem: Colorado won’t give her an identification card, and she won’t risk flying to her new great-grandson in Florida without it.
Though Kathan has a Swedish birth certificate and a recently expired Georgia ID, the new Colorado resident is losing her year-long battle to get a state ID.
“I don’t think Mom is a threat to national security, though it’s a biased opinion,” said her son, Jeffrey Kathan. “She is here since 1923. She grew up in New Jersey.”
The elder Kathan is one of a growing group of Coloradans, most American-born or naturalized, frustrated by stringent Colorado requirements for a driver’s license or ID card.
More stories are surfacing as word spreads of a lawsuit filed in Denver last week challenging a Division of Motor Vehicles rule requiring two forms of identification – one showing proof of age and lawful presence, the other giving proof of name – to get the cards.
Among those is the tale of Miriam Rosenzweig, a 93-year-old Boulder resident who lost her valid ID card and was rebuffed by DMV workers when she tried to replace it a month ago.
“They had this list of things she needed, fairly official things she didn’t need a year ago,” said her son, Eric Ross.
“Did I suddenly become dangerous?” Rosenzweig asked.
Scrambling to find any scrap of paper that would suffice, Ross lucked upon his mother’s missing ID. “You can imagine what’s happening to other people,” he said.
So far, Kathan’s story hasn’t had as happy an ending.
When she moved to Colorado and applied for a state ID card, she was told her Georgia card had expired and that she needed a birth certificate.
“We spent many months going through different towns in Sweden to get a true copy of her birth certificate,” Jeffrey Kathan said.
Certificate in hand, state workers told Kathan the Swedish document was insufficient. The reason: it wasn’t in English.
The Swedish Embassy in Washington, D.C., provided a certified translation. That wasn’t enough, either.
“Then they said they wouldn’t accept foreign birth certificates,” Jeffrey Kathan said of DMV. “They wanted citizenship papers.”
Kathan emigrated from Sweden as a 3-year-old with her parents and four siblings in 1923. It wasn’t too difficult locating her father’s citizenship papers from 1936, which included a statement from the National Archives certifying that his minor children were naturalized as well.
Back to DMV they went.
“The man said he didn’t know who the National Archives was and needed additional certifications,” Jeffrey Kathan said.
“That’s when Mom grabbed my arm and said, ‘Let’s get out of here,”‘ he said.
Elsi Kathan still doesn’t have a Colorado ID and still hasn’t seen her great-grandson Tre, who was born in Florida last month.
The ID problem is compounded by the state’s new immigration law, requiring public-benefit applicants to prove legal presence in the United States. That law went into effect Aug. 1.
“Two paths are converging: homeland security, which we recognize needs deference, and the notion of wanting to prove citizenship before anyone can access benefits,” said John Parvensky, director of the Colorado Coalition for Homelessness, which filed the lawsuit.
“When you put them together, it catches a lot of innocent people in its net,” Parvensky said.
Revenue director M. Michael Cooke, who oversees the DMV, declined to comment on the lawsuit.
Paula Harrison, a 50-year-old Montrose resident, also has gotten snagged by the new rules.
Harrison has had a valid Colorado driver’s license since 1995 and went to have it renewed when it expired a year ago.
A DMV worker noticed the name on her driver’s license – a married name she’s had for 20 years – didn’t match the name associated with her Social Security number, which reflected her name from a previous marriage.
“I was born in Berkeley; I’m a fourth-generation Californian,” Harrison said. “Now I can’t get a job and I can’t vote.”
The wait time for Los Angeles County to process her request for documents so the Social Security Administration can change her record, which would lead to a new Colorado driver’s license: three years.
Said Harrison: “The folks at Social Security said I should just drive safely.”
Staff writer David Migoya can be reached at 303-954-1506 or dmigoya@denverpost.com.
