NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — As we celebrate the nation’s birthday and what it means to be an American, a U.S. Navy veteran who has lived in the U.S. for more than seven decades and considers himself as patriotic as anyone said the state of Tennessee is challenging his citizenship.
The state said he’s not a U.S. citizen, but he provided documents that said he is.
David O’Connor has served his country and now the state is making him jump through hoops to prove he’s an American. And in the meantime, they’ve taken away his license to drive.
Watch a preview of my interview with O’Connor in the player above.
After a long career as a commercial truck driver, it may not surprise you that O’Connor drives a big truck. Only these days, he’s not actually driving it. Legally, he can’t.
Bryan Staples / WTVF
“You don’t have a driver’s license?” we asked O’Connor.
“No,” he replied.
“But you had a driver’s license?” we asked.
“I did,” O’Connor stated.
The 77-year-old had been driving for the last 61 years. He’s had driver’s licenses in New York, New Hampshire, Vermont and then eight years ago, when he moved to Tennessee, he got a license here.
But last month, Tennessee canceled O’Connor’s driver’s license.
“They told me I shouldn’t have had the license in the first place ’cause I couldn’t prove that I was a citizen,” O’Connor explained.
“It just blows my mind,” Jean O’Connor told NewsChannel 5 Investigates.
Jean is David’s wife.
“I am flabbergasted. I am outraged that, at 77 years old, he is now considered a non-citizen by the country that he has lived in his whole life,” Jean said.
It all started in early June when O’Connor went to the Driver Service Center in McMinn County to not only renew his driver’s license but get one of the new enhanced or Real IDs.
O’Connor took his birth certificate with him. It’s a Canadian birth certificate.
But.
“Your father was a U.S. citizen?” We asked O’Connor.
“He was,” he told me.
And I asked, “Your mother was a U.S. citizen?”
“She was,” he replied.
And since both of his parents were U.S. citizens, and you can see that right there on his birth certificate, the law stated O’Connor is a U.S. citizen, too.
His American-born parents had temporarily relocated to Canada and soon after O’Connor was born, the family moved back to the U.S.
Bryan Staples / WTVF
“I’ve been here for 77 years,” O’Connor said, adding, “None of this (situation) makes any sense to me.”
And no one, he said has ever questioned whether he’s really an American.
Until now.
“Now?!” Jean O’Connor exclaimed. “That’s the thing. Why now? At 77 years old? Are you kidding me? It’s unbelievable,”
Jean found it all especially unbelievable because her husband was able to join the U.S. Navy. He was just 17 when he enlisted. He served four years and was a sonar tech.
And if you look closely at his military discharge form, it asks if the person is a U.S. citizen. There’s a box for yes and a box for no. On O’Connor’s form, the “yes” box is checked.
“It says on my paperwork I am a U.S. citizen, he pointed out.
And that’s not all.
I asked O’Connor, “Have you voted?”
“Every year,” he told us.
He’s also got a Social Security card and now that he’s retired, he’s getting benefits.
And don’t forget, he was a truck driver so he had a commercial driver’s license for many years and was able to get a standard license in four states, including Tennessee. Yet now, he isn’t.
Jean O’Connor chimed in again, “It’s not fair. It’s not fair at all.”
Photo submitted to WTVF
Now to get a Real ID, which looks similar to a driver’s license, you need more documents than a standard license to prove who you are. There are eight different ways you can prove you are a U.S. citizen, but a Canadian birth certificate is not one of them.
Employees at the Driver Service Center in Athens, Tennessee, where O’Connor lives refused to give him a Real ID. And then things went from bad to worse. They refused to renew his license, again questioning his citizenship and his birth certificate.
“They said, ‘No, that’s no good. We shouldn’t have given you the license in the first place,'” O’Connor recalled.
He continued, “And they just canceled my license right then and there.”
Suddenly the Navy vet could no longer drive, couldn’t get on a plane, and won’t be able to vote in the upcoming elections. In the state’s eyes, he isn’t an American and O’Connor said that just about broke him.
“It’s like your country don’t want you. I’ve tried to do things the right way all my life. And now it’s like I’m nothing,” O’Connor said dejectedly.
So we took O’Connor’s story to Jeff Long, Commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security.
“He says he feels like this is a slap in the face and he feels like a nothing,” we recounted to the commissioner.
Long replied, “I can understand that, but everyone has to realize that after 911, the Real ID is very specific and has a federal requirement of what you have to have.”
Long was sympathetic, and said he’d look into it and help however he could, which was more than employees at the state’s Driver Service Center, where they told O’Connor that he would need to apply for citizenship, in other words, file paperwork to become a U.S. citizen, a process, mind you, that takes time.
“I’ll probably be dead before that ever goes through,” O’Connor retorted.
So at least for now, O’Connor can only sit in his truck and think about what it was like to drive it.
“I’m missing it. I drove all my life,” he said wistfully.
It’s been a month now since O’Connor lost his license.
The O’Connors were supposed to visit family last week in Vermont, but without a driver’s license, he couldn’t fly there so David had to cancel his airline tickets, and they had to have their son drive them there.
As for getting this all resolved, I first contacted the Safety and Homeland Security Department a week ago. Then, two days ago, I talked with Commissioner Long. But despite our efforts and Long’s promise to get to the bottom of it, neither I nor O’Connor has heard anything from the commissioner.
As to why the state took away his license and has refused to renew it, the Department cites a law that Tennessee lawmakers passed in 2018, after O’Connor got his original Tennessee license, that says that people who are not U.S. citizens cannot get a license in Tennessee even if they’ve had a license in another state, as O’Connor did.
But as we have pointed out to state officials, that law applies to people who are not U.S. citizens and, again, O’Connor is.
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