Will the REAL-ID Act deny you access to Federal facilities?
As we’ve noted in our previous commentaries on the REAL-ACT in this blog and in our recent presentation at the Cato Institute, there are two components to the threats against individual residents of “noncompliant” states (and territories and the District of Columbia) that are being used by the DHS to try to induce reluctant state governments to incorporate their state drivers license and ID databases to the distributed national REAL-ID database by connecting them to the contractor-operated REAL-ID hub:
- Threatened denial of common carrier airline transportation to individuals who present drivers licenses or other ID credentials issued by noncompliant states; and
- Threatened denial of access to (certain) Federal facilities to these individuals.
The first of these threats appears to be hollow. The TSA has consistently argued, when demands for ID from air travelers have been challenged in court, that no ID credentials at all are required to fly.
The TSA claims the right to subject any traveler to more intrusive search and interrogation, without probable cause, and may use this arbitrary power against residents of states that don’t comply with the REAL-ID Act. But the TSA appears to realize that it has no legal authority for outright denial of air travel to people who don’t have, or decline to carry or show to the TSA or its contractors, government-issued ID credentials, REAL-ID Act compliant or not.
With respect to its threat to deny access to Federal facilities, the DHS (in its usual fashion of rulemaking by press release) has posted an announcement on its website that this will be implemented in phases determined by the “Federal Security Level” (FSL) assigned to individual facilities.
But what are the facilities, if any, to which these levels have been assigned, and to which individuals with ID from noncompliant states will therefore be denied access? We’ve filed a series of Freedom of Information Act requests to find out.
The responses to our FOIA requests suggest that this prong of the REAL-ID Act enforcement cattle prod is, to mix metaphors, a paper tiger. We’ve been unable to find any Federal facility to which such an FSL has actually been assigned.