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The Associated Press

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico—In a windowless room near the Paso del Norte Bridge, tens of thousands of automobile license plates confiscated by Juarez police stack up from floor to ceiling. Many of them are Texas plates and many of them go unclaimed.

For Juarenses such as Jorge Cardona, surrendering his license plate to police after a traffic violation is a fact of life.

“They (police) did it to me last year already,” he said recently when he was once again outside the Aldama police station to pay his fine and get his plate back.

He had been stopped by traffic police for polluting, he said, and given a $50 fine that he somehow negotiated down to a $10 illegal lane change fine. It took him seven days to get around to getting the plate back because, “I was busy,” he said.

But for U.S. drivers, the pay-per-plate system might not be so familiar.

They may not have even seen their plates removed by traffic officers who unscrew the back plates of illegally parked cars, leaving behind a ticket on the windshield.

Most of the plates go to the Aldama station, just a block away from downtown El Paso, and drivers can get them back with their ticket or their plate number.

Fines can range from about $6 for a simple parking violation to $400 for drunken driving, officials said. At the end of the year, there is typically a discount period for traffic tickets in Juarez.

But most seized American plates waste away at the station.

Juan de Dios Quinones Castillo, in charge of ticket collection, said his employees see 300 to 400 people every morning.

“But Americans? Very few,” he said.

Quinones said he didn’t know how many plates he had in store.

Juarez city treasurer Alfredo Urias said that from 1998 to 2008, the city issued 44,443 traffic tickets, the great majority to Juarenses, for a total of $10 million. In the same time period, police took 29,508 Mexican and American license plates.

“Police take the plate, or the driver’s license, or for a more serious crime, the car itself, as a guarantee that the fine will be paid,” Urias said. “But for Americans, it is just as easy to go back to El Paso and get a replacement license plate or driver’s license. It doesn’t cost them very much.”

The mountain of U.S. plates may be deceiving, Urias said, because the owners might be Juarenses who bought cars in the United States and never bothered to register them in Mexico.

Urias said the city launched a campaign this year to force Mexican car owners to register their cars with Mexican plates.