Maria Galvan of Van Nuys has been breathing easier since she obtained her driver’s license in March.

Galvan had previously been stopped by police twice, and both she and her husband had their cars confiscated for driving without a license, she said. They each had to pay fines of $1,500 and were unable to pay the required fees to reclaim their cars, she said.

“Now I drive feeling calm,” Galvan, an organizer for Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, said this week in Spanish. “Now, I don’t have to worry about seeing patrol cars. I’m more confident” and she’s following the rules, she said.

Galvan was one of more than 600,000 undocumented immigrants in California who received their driver’s license last year under a new bill that allowed them to drive legally for the first time in more than two decades.

Some 605,000 licenses were issued last year to undocumented drivers out of about 830,000 AB 60 applicants applying for a license, according to the California Department of Motor Vehicles. The highest number of these licenses were handed out in March, in which 76,000 undocumented immigrants obtained them, said DMV spokesman Jaime Garza.

Garza called the law’s implementation “a huge success.”

“We had about a year to put together a program and implement it on Jan. 2 of last year,” Garza said. “We started with nothing and put together a large program statewide that was successfully implemented.”

Nearly one-third of all driver’s licenses issued in December were issued under AB 60, according to the DMV.

It’s unclear how many of those who obtained licenses under AB 60 have registered vehicles or bought insurance, Garza said.

The DMV hired about 1,000 additional employees to meet the need caused by the new law and opened four driver’s license processing centers, including one in Granada Hills, to accommodate the increased need, Garza said. The centers, which served anyone seeking a driver’s license, were open on Saturday until October, he said.

“We prepared for a huge influx and didn’t want it to impact our other operations,” he said. “We wanted to make sure we could adequately serve the new people coming in and serve our existing customer base.”

The DMV also started allowing people to book appointments 90 days in advance instead of only 45 days in advance, he said.

DMV officials had hoped to see an improvement in the pass-fail rate of the written knowledge exam with the influx of new applicants but that percentage has largely held steady around 45 to 47 percent, Garza said.

Critics of AB 60 have argued that the law rewards undocumented immigrants for breaking the law.