Not as a student with an F1 visa. Legally you’re still a resident of your home country.
It would still make her unlicensed in the US. From your own cite in post 13
“If you become a resident instead of a visitor to the United States then the state in which you reside will normally require you to exchange your Canadian license for a state license.”
As a resident of the US without a US drivers license I’m not sure why at this point they dropped the charges. Other than the bad publicity. In my state being unlicensed is a minor charge and not nearly as serious as driving while suspended.
The does not mean you are not required to get a local license. I have never once had a foreign student attempt to use a foreign license. They all know to get a NJ license. And I have dealt with students from all over the world. Whenever I get presented a foreign license it never been a college student and they usually can be cited for being unlicensed.
No, no one is going to extradite for a traffic ticket. But various kinds of reciprocal agreements exist between most Canadian provinces and US states such that the local jurisdiction imposes penalties and sanctions for offenses committed in the other. Ontario appears to have reciprocal agreements with 41 states (Georgia not included) regarding court judgments rendered with respect to motor vehicle offenses, which I take to at least allow the possibility, in the absence of more specific agreements, for the offender’s license to be suspended or plate renewal refused for failure to pay a traffic fine assessed in those states.
In any case it seems incredibly draconian to arrest someone for a minor traffic offense just because they are out of state, which apparently involves fingerprinting and a permanent arrest record – even without those reciprocal agreements. I’ve never heard of that happening here. In fact when my brother got back to Ontario from living in California, he was pulled over for some traffic offense while he still had his California driver’s license. Far for being thrown in jail, the cop said “well, we wouldn’t want to be ticketing our visitors, now, would we?” and let him off. Mind you, this isn’t Georgia or Mississippi.
I don’t disagree. 20 years ago it was possible to get a motor vehicle warrant here but it had to be for a serious offense and you had to justify it with showing there were multiple failure to appear offenses on the driver’s record. Now it requires a call to a judge who is not going to grant it. It’s got to be 15 years since I’ve seen a traffic arrest for anything other than DWI. The concept is strange to me. You either get a ticket or not and you are sent on your way.
The requirements, it appears, go by state.
Georgia, it appears, has only two categories:
(1) foreigners who are passing through; and
(2) foreigners who establish residency (are staying for school, business or work )in Georgia.
From:
This lady may have established residency in another state, but that is the business of that other state - it may be she is in violation of that other state’s laws.
However, she has clearly not established residency in Georgia, so as far as the laws of this state are concerned, she’s a “non-US citizen” and her license is valid (if it is a valid license).
This explains why the courts in Georgia, quite correctly, dropped all charges: she wasn’t breaking Georgia laws, which apparently care nothing about whether she’s established residency in another state of the union or not.
Well, I wouldnt be sure. In CA at least a speeding ticket is definitely not a crime, it is a infraction. You can’t get a jury trail, etc.
And one would think that a trained law enforcement officer in Georgia would know the law, too, but there you go …
Maybe some Texans have never gotten over not being the biggest state anymore.
I say this to the young lady with peace and love:
sue the pants off them and insist that any settlement includes the permanent firing of that asshole officer
peace and love!
I’ve done this literally hundreds of times since 9/11, and never seen an I-94.
I wouldn’t bet on it. CBP makes mistakes all the time. I’ve seen them admit people as tourists when given their passport with a work visa in it. I’ve seen them admit infants as the primary employee on a work visa (rather than in the appropriate dependent category). Among many many other errors.
As you may know, the driver’s license issued by Québec is written in French. It does have a picture, the person’s full name, address, etc., and any reasonable person would recognise it as a driver’s license, but of course the words “Driver’s license” are not there: it says “Permis de conduire”, and so on.
Around 2013, police officers in Georgia started rejecting these licenses as invalid. There are quite a few people who drive up and down I-95 every winter, so this was a big deal up here. Authorities in Georgia said that an International Driving Permit was required if the license was not in English, so people had to buy one of those every year, just because they would be crossing Georgia on their way to Florida. The situation was supposedly resolved in 2016.
So it’s not like Georgia police officers have never heard of Canadian drivers before.
Your interpretation may be correct. I don’t have specific knowledge of the law in Georgia.
It varies from state to state. Many have a mixture of infractions and misdemeanors in their motor vehicle code. Though I have no personal knowledge all the cites I’ve read say speeding is a misdemeanor in Georgia.
She was speeding. That’s an arrestable offense in Georgia. On what grounds will she be able to get any pants in a settlement? She could probably get some nuisance money out of it.
Just to be clear, that was simply an open question that nobody had answered at the time. It has now been answered and is not in dispute, thanks.
For all foreign visitors, I-94 processing airports is now electronic; but CBP apparently still issues a paper I-94 to non-Canadian foreign visitors at land borders.
So we don’t have a definitive cite yet for why most Canadian visitors are not given paper I-94s at land borders. Is it because Canadians fall outside the I-94 system altogether, or because Canadian visitors (unlike other foreign visitors) are processed electronically at land borders?
Yes, that was my read on the position, too. If you are arrested ostensibly on two charges, and one of the charges (speeding) is an arrestable offense but the other (no valid license) is incorrect, it’s hard to imagine how you have grounds for a false arrest claim. I mean, the fact that they can arrest you for speeding in Georgia seems like a bad law, but under the law as it stands I don’t see how this is a “sue the pants off them” situation, much as I’d like it to be.
Hmm. Either I’m misremembering and actually got a Michigan license, or Michigan had different rules 25 years ago than NJ does now, or I was breaking the rules without realizing it (was never pulled over during my time there). I have no idea which of these is the correct alternative. 
And the speeding was the reason for the stop so you can’t disregard the entire stop as being improper.
Here is a link to a local news station article. It includes the Cook County Sheriff’s office response:
And here is the Georgia Dept. of Driver services guidance they reference:
The “if available” addendum, as indicted in a prior post, does seem to indicate that a passport doesn’t have to be carried at all times - and certainly not a “hard copy” as mentioned by the CCSD statement. Bearing any other info unknown to the general public, this was handled very poorly by CCSD.
Thanks for that. I have two comments to add. Here is roughly what the front of an Ontario driver’s license looks like. It’s loaded with microprint, security features, and tamper-proof features; the holder’s photo appears twice, a large version and a smaller identical one with additional tamper protection, and the holder’s signature also appears twice, photographically embedded in the plastic. This is among the reasons it’s considered trusted official ID for many legal purposes throughout Canada. I would love to have the Cook County Sheriff’s office explain how this could plausibly be a “fake” or belong to someone else. This is very obviously not something you can make on a laser printer, and the girl’s photo is staring the cop in the face.
And “Cook County Sheriff” brought an “aha!” moment. This was not the Georgia State Patrol. Here is a comment from among the many that followed the OP article – this is just a reader comment, thus not authoritative, but interesting nonetheless:
I live near I-75 in Georgia just north of Atlanta - a very long way from Adel, GA. That area has been known to finance their counties through bogus charges and fines, often intimidating the drivers into simply paying up. At one point it was so bad that Georgia lawmakers restricted all Interstate stops to the Georgia State Patrol. Sadly, at some point, they forgot how bad it had been and relented to South-Georgia legislators’ pressure.