Real ID Act: A new attack on immigrant rights

By Ben Becker

Jul 01, 2005

How do you make an $82 billion war appropriations bill worse than it already is? By attaching to it a piece of viciously anti-immigrant legislation that endorses racist vigilantism, gives unlimited power to the Department of Homeland Security, denies due process, limits free speech, and paves the way for national identification cards. The Bush administration attached the Real ID Act to its war-funding bill knowing that no Democratic senators would dare to take a stand against any so-called “support our troops” legislation. None did.

On May 10, the bill passed the Senate unanimously. Regardless of its periodic anti-war posturing, the Democratic Party—the party that claims to be for progressive people and people of color—again acted as accomplice not only to Bush’s foreign war but also to its attacks on civil liberties at home.

An attack on immigrant communities

To expose the Real ID Act as an aggressive attack on immigrant communities barely requires analysis. The new laws, which will take effect in 2008, expose themselves.

For example, the Real ID Act requires applicants seeking political asylum in the United States to provide documentary evidence that they are fleeing persecution. This will in effect make it impossible for most asylum applicants to come to the United States, since it requires the persecuted to obtain confirmation letters from their persecutors. Over 14,000 immigrants sought political asylum status in the United States in 2003.

Often, immigrants facing deportation appeal to a judge to have their case reviewed. The Real ID Act will not allow judges to delay the deportation of immigrants in order to hear their appeals, effectively eliminating such judicial review. In other words, immigrants will only be able to appeal their deportation after they’ve been deported.

The Real ID Act empowers the Department of Homeland Security to waive all laws in order to construct walls and fences at United States borders. The barriers are not subject to any judicial review.

The Real ID Act gives unprecedented authority to bounty hunters to arrest immigrants subject to deportation. Any bounty hunter—private vigilantes—who is simply of the opinion that an immigrant is a “flight risk,” can apprehend and turn in that immigrant to the Department of Homeland Security. Bounty hunters will be given access to all information possessed by the government that “may be helpful” in the hunt for undocumented immigrants. In essence, the fascist Minutemen now “patrolling” the borders could be given full license to prowl the streets. 

The Real ID Act enables the federal government to deport any immigrant who gives material support to any organization claimed by the U.S. government to be terrorist. The Act gives no clear definition of “material support” and the federal government, of course, defines as terrorist practically any organization struggling against U.S.-allied governments. 

Under the Patriot Act, an immigrant could be deported for giving material aid to “terrorist activity.” The Real ID Act gives the government even more authority. Even an immigrant giving purely humanitarian aid—such as to a hospital or charity in Palestine—could be deported if the U.S. government claims the charity has any ties whatsoever to the Palestinian Liberation Organization. 

This part of the Real ID Act effectively makes it a crime for immigrants to support liberation struggles against unjust and brutal governments abroad. Juan José Gutiérrez of Latino Movement USA, speaking at a May 17 ANSWER meeting in Los Angeles, said, “If today Nelson Mandela were still incarcerated, any immigrant who sent money to a fund to win his freedom could be placed in deportation proceedings.” 

Taking away driver’s licenses

Undocumented immigrants in eleven states can obtain driver’s licenses. Since undocumented immigrants need to drive anyway, the best way to make the roads safe is to make licenses available to all drivers. 

The Real ID Act will now force states to issue specially marked or stamped licenses to undocumented immigrants. Very few undocumented immigrants will likely seek any document that earmarks them as “illegal”—especially since that information could immediately be turned over to bounty hunters.

Although technically a state could ignore this provision of the Act and continue issuing driver’s licenses as before, in order for federal agencies and airports to accept a particular state’s driver’s licenses, the state must adhere to the Department of Homeland Security’s rules. Similarly, states that refuse to adopt DHS rules are subject to losing federal money.

Also under the Act, citizens and non-citizens alike will have to present more documents to obtain a driver’s license, and all documents will have to be verified. This will be impossible for many immigrants, whether legal residents or not. Foreign governments, for instance, will surely be unable to verify every passport and birth certificate in a timely way. 

The government’s excessive cross-checking and matching of all documents could pose serious difficulties for the transgender community. Many transgender people have since changed the information—including name and gender—initially put on their birth certificates. Members of that community have expressed great concern about how the Real ID Act will affect their ability to acquire official identification, such as a driver’s license. The government has made no attempt to address the issue.

For such a thorough checking of documents, the Department of Homeland Security requires states to integrate their databases, and requires the new state IDs to be “machine-readable.” These changes effectively will make the standard driver’s license a national ID. It also opens the door for the installation of technology like the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip, which would enable the DHS to track and follow anyone with an ID. 

The government plans to take virtually all rights away from undocumented immigrants, one of the most vulnerable sectors of the working class. Although the media discusses the Real ID Act in terms of the “War on Terror,” it has nothing to do with terrorism—like every other facet of Bush’s phony war. The Real ID act does much more than regulate driver’s licenses—it is a comprehensive attack on immigrants’ rights and further erodes all workers rights.

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