FALLS CHURCH, Va. — When Mohamed Mejri, a Tunisian immigrant with a limousine business here, first learned that the State Department of Motor Vehicles had refused to issue him a new driver’s license, he thought it was a mistake. After all, he had been a licensed driver in Virginia for years.
But last fall, the department stopped accepting his federally issued work permit, a document that was his main proof that he was in the country legally, because he does not have a green card.
Now, five months later, his business is collapsing, and bill collectors are calling.
Virginia changed its policy in September after an illegal immigrant from Bolivia was charged with hitting and killing a nun while driving drunk in Prince William County.
Her death hardened what was already a strong anti-immigrant mood in the state. Virginia’s governor, Bob McDonnell, announced that work permits would no longer be accepted as proof of legal residence because they could be held by people who, like the Bolivian immigrant, are in deportation proceedings. The governor said other documents would still be accepted.
The permit, called the employment authorization document, allows foreign nationals to work in the United States. Asylum seekers, refugees and students are among those who have one.
For Mr. Mejri, who is 54, the permit is all he has. He fled Tunisia in 1992, and after living in Canada, where he had been granted political asylum, he came to the United States in 2000. American immigration authorities rejected his application for asylum, over an unpaid fine in Canada. By the time it was paid and processed, several years had passed, and he received notice that it was too late to reapply. He then received an administrative order to leave the country, but a federal judge ruled in his favor that he not be deported. Now he is in limbo, in the country legally but without any path to citizenship.
Melanie Stokes, a spokeswoman for Virginia’s Department of Motor Vehicles, said she could not comment on Mr. Mejri’s status because state law prevented her from discussing individual cases.
The precise number of people affected by the change is unknown. Jorge Figueredo of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia said he was personally handling 38 cases, and estimated that the total number of stranded immigrants could be in the hundreds.
The authorities said the numbers were much smaller. In a letter to a group of lawyers and immigrant advocacy organizations in January, the commissioner of motor vehicles, Richard D. Holcomb, said that in the 11 weeks after the policy was implemented, about 4,000 applicants entered an “elevated review process,” a reference to people who used to rely on the employment card. Of those, only 819 did not immediately get a license, the letter said.
By early December, more than 60 percent of those people had received a license using other documents, he wrote, and an additional 3 percent were rejected, mostly because they were in deportation proceedings.
Mr. Figueredo, the state A.C.L.U.’s director of racial justice and immigrants’ rights, said he was not satisfied with the response, adding that the letter did not explain what became of the more than 200 applicants who were neither rejected outright nor given licenses.
“What about the rest?” he said in his small office in Falls Church last week. A plea for help from a Kenyan man dropped into his e-mail inbox during the interview.
Ms. Stokes reiterated that only 3 percent had been rejected and said that the others had not returned to obtain a license by the time the records were checked in December. She said the department had no way of knowing what happened to them.
“We can only surmise that they moved to another state or decided not to get a credential,” she said.
After Mr. Mejri was first refused a new license, he went to five other Department of Motor Vehicles offices, hoping his documents would be accepted.
At one, a clerk requested the original court order granting his petition against deportation. It took eight weeks, but he produced it. A copy was faxed to Richmond, but it had no effect. He was never rejected outright, he said, and was asked repeatedly for additional proof of legal residence.
“This should not be happening,” Mr. Figueredo said. “This man is legally present. He has a decision by a federal judge. Why isn’t that good enough?”
Mr. Mejri soon fell behind on his bills, and his insurance company canceled his liability coverage. That triggered the cancellation of his business license. Meanwhile, credit card companies continued to charge him for use of their services for his cars, souring his credit rating.
He felt particularly helpless when he discovered that he could not even buy the syringes he needed to treat his diabetes without presenting a valid driver’s license and had to work through a social worker to get them.
“I am demoralized,” Mr. Mejri said, tears rolling under his glasses onto his sweater. “I see no door open in front of me. Nobody wants to listen.”
Ms. Stokes said there was a special center in Richmond to review such claims that could contact federal immigration authorities directly to ascertain an applicant’s status.
She could not say whether this had been done in Mr. Mejri’s case. She said there was a clearly defined list of documents, posted online, that are accepted. She said she did not know the number of applicants who failed to get licenses since December.
Mr. Figueredo said that clerks have not been consistent in accepting certain alternative documents.
Some immigrants have had success presenting a document called an I-797, essentially a receipt for a visa application, but others have not. To address that problem, a bill was presented in Virginia’s House in January that would have required the department to spell out its procedure, Mr. Figueredo said, but it did not pass.
A month ago, Mr. Mejri rented a room in Rockville, Md., and got a driver’s license in that state. But his monthly insurance payments have tripled, and for now, he has put his business aside. He lives off money he has borrowed from his friend Aziz Balaid, an American citizen, who is finding it more difficult to be optimistic about his friend’s prospects.
“When he says, ‘What am I going to do?’ I have no answer for him,” Mr. Balaid said.
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