On Monday, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt tweeted a picture of a New York state commercial driver’s license his officers seized during an “enforcement action” on an interstate highway.
The name on this official state document, found on one of 125 illegal-immigrant drivers apprehended by the Oklahoma Highway Patrol: “No Name Given”.
No city or state suffered more on 9/11, but this single incident shows how even the Empire State has forgotten the lessons of that horrible day — and how New York’s solicitousness for illegal immigrants is setting America up for a tragic replay.
All but one of the 19 illegal aliens who carried out those attacks in 2001 had some type of US-issued identification document.
As Richard Barth, then-assistant secretary for policy development at the Department of Homeland Security, told the Senate in March 2007, the terrorists found it easy to fraudulently obtain driver’s licenses and state-issued IDs.
Take Hani Hanjour, the Saudi national who hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 and flew it into the Pentagon that morning, killing 184 innocents. He had IDs from three different states.
Those US-issued IDs, Barth noted, “enabled the hijackers to maneuver throughout the United States in order to plan and execute critical elements of their mission” — allowing them to “rent cars, travel, take flying lessons and board airplanes.”
“The 9/11 hijackers evidently believed that holding driver’s licenses and ID cards would allow them to operate freely in our country,” he chillingly concluded. “And they were right.”
The bipartisan 9/11 Commission, tasked with investigating those attacks and making recommendations to ensure they could never be replicated, recognized that easy access to domestic IDs created an unacceptable vulnerability to our homeland.
In their final report, the commissioners advised the federal government to set stringent new standards for driver’s licenses.
“Fraud in identification documents is no longer just a problem of theft,” they explained.
“At many entry points to vulnerable facilities . . . sources of identification are the last opportunity to ensure that people are who they say they are and to check whether they are terrorists.”
In response, Congress passed the REAL ID Act of 2005.
Among other things, it established verification requirements states must follow in issuing licenses and other IDs that can be used for federal purposes — like boarding aircraft and entering federal buildings — and mandated that certain information appear on those documents.
Including, at section 202(b)(1): “The person’s full legal name.”
The image Gov. Stitt tweeted shows a purportedly REAL ID-compliant New York state CDL, identifiable by the star in its upper right-hand corner.
And yet, that document was issued to “No Name Given.”
Perhaps the Given family decided to pull the cruelest possible prank on their newborn child and christened him “No Name.”
More likely, though, a New York Department of Motor Vehicles clerk issued what’s supposed to be among the most secure documents in our nation — an ID allowing the bearer to enter a nuclear facility — to an individual who failed to provide that most rudimentary identifier, a full legal name.
Worse is the fact that this is not a simple ID, but rather a commercial driver’s license.
The 9/11 hijackers had to overpower flight crews and steer massive aircraft at high rates of speed to commit their attacks.
Think of the carnage a malevolent trucker with the wrong cargo could wreak.
There’s a reason that semis on our highways are emblazoned with hazmat placards like “flammable gas,” “explosives” and “radioactive”: They warn other drivers to steer clear or risk calamity.
But what if calamity on a massive scale, impacting tens of thousands of our citizens, is the reason the driver is barreling down the highway?
That’s not a “bad commute” — it’s a national disaster.
A goal of the REAL ID Act was to ensure only US citizens and legal immigrants could obtain compliant IDs.
New York, having decided it can ignore our immigration laws, has now apparently set its sights on bypassing other federal mandates, as well.
Until this issue is resolved, President Donald Trump would be within his rights to bar travelers from using New York state “REAL IDs” when attempting to board aircraft or enter federally protected facilities.
There’s no reason for “No Name Given” to have a REAL ID commercial driver’s license — and New Yorkers, of all people, should understand why.
Andrew Arthur, the fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, drafted the Real ID Act of 2005.
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