Immigrant rights activist Ignacio Acevedo arrived at the Goshen DMV to visit with County Clerk Annie Rabbitt on one of her few breaks from the action here inside the county's only current location where Green Light license applications can be processed from beginning-to-end.

Acevedo, the leader of "The Best Immigrant Footprints," told the clerk his group members want to know why her office is administering fewer Green Light driver's permit tests than it was when the law went into effect on December 16. The law allows undocumented immigrants to legally apply for licenses.

"It went from 120, to 100, to 60," Acevedo recalled of the changes in the per-day limits for permit tests "Are we doing something now to turn it back to 100?"

Rabbitt said the flow of Green Light license applicants has not slowed down, as her staff had hoped, forcing her to lower the number of daily test slots to the current 60.

She also mentioned space issues, staff issues and applicants for the new state IDs many state residents need before October in order to fly domestically.

The timing was far from optimal.

"Green Light is not the problem," Rabbitt said of the delays. "It's our enhanced and our Real ID, and Green Light passing in between all of this."

Acevedo suggested Rabbitt's staff seek help from community groups like his.

"I think it might be to the benefit of everything and your work to let the word out, saying, 'Look. We need support here in the county in the DMVs," he said. "[We can] create a coalition to deal with this issue."

Rabbitt replied that community leaders and state lawmakers who lobbied for the law's passage have left her staff high and dry, with no extra funding and little extra help.

"Advocates -- who pretend like they're advocates to the world -- They're the ones who look the other way and couldn't care less what's going inside here to ask us, 'Could we help with the testing?' or 'Could we help interpret?' They don't," she said.

In December, Rabbitt was hoping to begin accepting Green Light applications at DMV locations in Newburgh, Middletown and Port Jervis once foreign document scanners arrived to those locations, according to state and county lawmakers.

Acevedo says his group's members keep asking him about that.

"It's like, people calling you, calling you, and calling you," Acevedo said of concerned immigrants. "They're like, 'When is this going to change?' and 'When is this situation going to be improved?'"

Rabbitt said the scanning equipment is no longer the main issue.

She said the other DMVs do not have enough space, and accepting Green Light applications would turn those locations into madhouses where few people get served.

"I'd be opening up that door for everyone in the state of New York to come inside those DMVs and then we're going to have lines around [the DMV] a mile long," she expressed to Acevedo.

Rabbitt added, though, that if numbers decrease to the point where her staff can handle them without incurring much overtime, and if they find that they would be legally allowed to restrict their services to only Orange County residents, then her staff might consider taking applications at other locations in the future.