HIALEAH, FLORIDA — Construction worker Alex López, 41, a native of Guatemala, manages on job sites with limited English. He understands tools and boss instructions, but that wasn’t enough when he sat for Florida’s 50-question driver’s exam — given only in English — and failed.
“My inglés no es muy malo,” López said in Spanish. “After they gave me instructions and taught me how to use the computer program, I froze. I felt sick.”
Florida long offered written tests in Spanish, but this February the state began requiring written and oral driving exams only in English, with no translators. The change, adopted by Republican leaders, came amid heightened rhetoric about immigration and followed a fatal crash less than a year earlier in which a commercial truck driver making an illegal U-turn killed three people on the Florida Turnpike. Gov. Ron DeSantis called the move “a good reform.”
Supporters say English-only testing promotes safety. “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 state Rep. Berny Jacques (R-Seminole), who supports the requirement and noted Florida voters made English the state’s official language in 1988. Jacques, who was born in Haiti, said the rule will encourage immigrants to assimilate.
Critics argue the policy unfairly targets Hispanic and other minority communities and that there’s no evidence limited English proficiency makes drivers more hazardous. Adriana Rivera of the Florida Immigrant Coalition warned the rule could push people to drive without licenses in a state with poor public transportation. “We’re going to create a class of people that are going to be criminalized for something as simple as picking up a prescription,” she said. She added the policy could particularly harm Puerto Ricans in Orlando and other non-English speakers across Florida.
The policy makes Florida one of only a few states with English-only driving tests — and the largest, by far, in terms of diversity. Roughly one in three Floridians speaks a language other than English at home.
Miami-Dade County, majority Hispanic and home to many Spanish and Haitian Creole speakers, has been particularly affected. The rule went fully into effect in April. Debate over language has long shaped Miami politics: after the Mariel boatlift in 1980, the county once limited taxpayer-funded programs in languages other than English, a measure later repealed in the early 1990s. Manny Díaz, a Cuban-American leader who helped repeal that ordinance and later served as Miami’s mayor, said he was disappointed by the state’s new requirement. “My first thought was, ‘My God, I thought we were done with this,’” Díaz said, calling the change unnecessary and harmful to a multilingual county.
At Speedway Driving School in Hialeah, which serves recent Latin American immigrants, instructors have redesigned lessons to help Spanish speakers navigate the English-only exam. Johannes González, who teaches at the school, says he can’t make students fluent in short classes. Instead he teaches mostly in Spanish while drilling key English words and test formats. He shows PowerPoint slides with sample questions and emphasizes words that share Latin roots with Spanish — for example, velocity and velocidad, pedestrian and peatón.
“Maximum highway speed, right? Seventy miles an hour. Te lo pongo en inglés, es más o menos igual. Maximum,” González told students in a mix of English and Spanish.
Classes have lengthened because more people fail the exam on their first try, so the school now charges a flat fee that allows students to attend as many sessions as needed. González says students over 50 struggle more with the format; Yuri Rodríguez, the school’s owner, said enrollments have dropped because many are afraid they won’t pass.
On a recent Saturday, eight students squeezed into a classroom decorated with road signs. Their backgrounds varied: one had moved from Colombia two weeks earlier; another, Yaima Fuentes Pérez, 41, arrived from Cuba just over a year ago and secured a green card after the English-only rule took effect. A former journalist, Fuentes said she needed a license to attend accounting classes and wished the test were available 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.
After weeks of study, Fuentes missed only one answer on the written test. López, however, failed again and returned to the classroom to continue memorizing keywords and practicing the test format, hopeful he can pass the next time.
