Twenty Years After 9/11 and the REAL ID Act Still Isn’t in Effect
By Jon Feere on September 9, 2021
In 2005, Congress passed the REAL ID Act in order to meet the 9/11 Commission’s recommendation that the federal government set standards for the issuance of state driver’s licenses. This was recommended after it was determined that the 9/11 terrorists had nearly 30 driver’s licenses among the 19 of them, each with varying information. Twenty years after the 9/11 attack, this recommendation remains unrealized, with the latest deadline for implementation having been pushed back by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to May 3, 2023.
Among other things, the REAL ID Act requires states to indicate on a driver’s license if a person is barred from using it for federal purposes such as boarding airplanes or entering government buildings. States that issue driver’s licenses to illegal aliens are required to make the license different from a standard license so that Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officials and security guards at government buildings can easily determine that the holder must be stopped. But as of this writing, because of repeated extensions by DHS, anyone can board airplanes with low-standard driver’s licenses that are not REAL ID compliant, including illegal aliens with largely unknown backgrounds.
The following states issue driver’s licenses to illegal aliens: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington. To obtain one, an illegal alien must submit to the state some form of documentation, which might be a foreign birth certificate, a foreign passport, or some largely unverifiable consular identification document. The FBI warned about the unreliability of consular cards, like Mexico’s matricula consular which have been passed out like candy by the Mexican government, in congressional testimony titled “Consular ID Cards in a Post-9/11 World”.
https://cis.org/Feere/Twenty-Years-After-911-and-REAL-ID-Act-Still-Isnt-Effect
