On Wednesday, May 7, 2025, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) plans to start treating driver’s licenses and state IDs that don’t comply with the REAL-ID Act as “unacceptable” ID at TSA checkpoints. That doesn’t mean that travelers without REAL-ID won’t be allowed to fly. What the TSA has said is that it will subject travelers without REAL-ID on or after May 7th to its current procedures for airline passengers with no ID or unacceptable ID.
In a sample of incident logs and reports released in response to one of our Freedom Of Information Act requests, 98% of the airline passengers who showed up at TSA checkpoints with no ID or unacceptable ID were allowed to fly after additional “security theater”.
But given the numbers of people without REAL-ID, even 2% of those who try to fly without REAL-ID could be a significant number. And if you’re the one being told, “You can’t fly today”, any number of unlawful and denials of your right to travel is significant.
Some people without REAL-ID will be turned away illegally at TSA checkpoints. Others will be delayed for so long that they miss their flights. Of that latter group, some will be denied refunds by airlines, or told they have to pay change fees to fly on later flights.
What are your rights at the airport? What can you do if you are turned away by the TSA because you don’t have REAL-ID, delayed and miss your flight, or denied a refund or charged a fee to change a flight you missed because of TSA delays and ID checks?
This isn’t advice from lawyers, but it’s practical advice about what to do to protect your rights and maximize your chances if you later take the TSA or an airline to court.
SR 18, introduced yesterday in the Oklahoma Legislature by state Sen. Kendal Sacchieri (R-Blanchard) would re-affirm the right of Oklahoma residents to choose to have driver’s licenses and state IDs that don’t comply with the Federal REAL-ID Act — and not to have data about those noncompliant licenses shared with Federal agencies without a warrant.
“Sixty percent of Oklahomans have declined to participate in the federal REAL ID system,” Sen. Sacchieri noted in introducing SR 18. “Senate Resolution 18 is about protecting Oklahomans’ privacy and preserving their freedom to choose. We affirm our citizens’ right to opt out of the federal REAL ID system, and we must also ensure their personal information remains secure. This resolution calls for a real, uncoerced choice — without unnecessary exposure of private data.”
[Summary of TSA procedures for airline passengers with no ID or unacceptable ID, from DHS Office of Inspector General report OIG-2024-65, September 2024]
What does this mean if you want to fly but don’t have any of the types of ID that the TSA deems compliant with the REAL-ID Act (including a US or foreign passport, a US passport card, a Canadian provincial driver’s license, or a US driver’s license or state ID with a REAL-ID gold star in the upper right corner or that is marked as an “Enhanced Drivers License”)?
The key thing to know is that — unless the TSA makes undisclosed changes to its procedures — air travelers with “noncompliant” ID on or after May 7, 2025, should be treated, and should be allowed to fly, the same way people with no ID fly today.
We can’t predict with certainty what the TSA will do on May 7th, because:
With these uncertainties in mind, what can we say about what will be required and will happen at airports on May 7th?
No.
The TSA itself has stated repeatedly in court, under oath, in litigation in which The Identity Project and individuals we support have been involved, that no Federal law or regulation requires airline passengers to have, carry, or show any ID.
See e.g. State of New Mexico v. Phillip Mocek, in which a TSA witness testified that, “It [flying without ID] happens all the time. We have a procedure for that”, and Gilmore v. Gonzales, in which the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found, based on the TSA’s own submissions to the court, that, “Gilmore had a meaningful choice. He could have presented identification, submitted to a search, or left the airport. That he chose the latter does not detract from the fact that he could have boarded the airplane had he chosen one of the other two options.”
People fly without ID every day, openly and legally.
Years-delayed responses by the TSA to our Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests show that, as of 2016, almost 2,000 people a day were allowed through TSA checkpoints at airports nationwide with no ID or with ID that was deemed “unacceptable”. TSA incident logs released in response to our FOIA requests show that 98% of travelers who showed up at airports with no ID or with “unacceptable” ID were allowed to fly after undergoing additional questioning and/or more intrusive searches and groping (“screening”).
No.
The REAL-ID Act governs which IDs can be accepted by Federal agencies such as the TSA in circumstances where ID is required. It doesn’t create any new requirements to have, carry, or show any ID in circumstances — such as airline travel — where ID is not required by some other law.
According to the latest TSA statement on April 11, 2025:
Passengers who present a state-issued identification that is not REAL ID compliant and who do not have another acceptable alternative (e.g., passport) can expect to face delays, additional screening and the possibility of not being permitted into the security checkpoint…. TSA … will continue with additional screening measures for those without a REAL ID until it is no longer considered a security vulnerability.
This doesn’t say that individuals without REAL-ID, or without any ID, will be prevented from flying. All it says is that these individuals will be subjected to “additional screening” (which of course may occasion delay) and the “possibility” of not being permitted into the checkpoint (i.e. if they don’t agree to submit to additional searches).
So far as we can tell, airline passengers who show up at TSA checkpoints on or after May 7, 2025, with noncompliant ID or no ID will be treated the same way travelers with “unacceptable” ID (expired IDs, student IDs, IDs issued by private employers, etc.) or no ID at all (lost or stolen or forgotten or just don’t have ID) are treated now.
We don’t have up-to-date, unredacted versions of the TSA’s instructions to checkpoint staff at airports. But based on previously-released versions of the TSA’s Standard Operating Procedures(SOPs) for Travel Document and ID Checks and for the TSA’s ID Verification Call Center (IVCC), TSA testimony and pleading in court cases, TSA ID verification logs and incident reports released in response to our FOIA requests, reports we’ve received from travelers without ID, the most recent 2024 report from the DHS Office of Inspector General on procedures for airline passengers without ID or with unacceptable ID, TSA testimony to Congress in 2024, and our own experiences, here’s what happens when a ticketed airline passenger shows up at a TSA checkpoint with no ID or “unacceptable” ID:
A bipartisan proposal to withdraw the state of Maine from compliance with the Federal REAL-ID Act of 2005 had its first hearing today (archived video) before the Joint Standing Committee on Transportation of the Maine State Legislature.
The REAL-ID withdrawal bill, LD 160, was presented to the Transportation Committee by state Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn) and state Sen. Nicole Grohowski (D-Ellsworth), two of the six co-sponsors.
Public testimony in support of LD 160 was given by:
There was no public testimony against LD 160. The only opposition to the bill was voiced by Maine’s Secretary of State, Shenna Bellows.
Secretary of State Bellows struggled to explain her current support for REAL-ID compliance, in light of her history of opposition to the REAL-ID Act and Maine state compliance in her former positions as Executive Director of the ACLU of Maine and Maine State Senator.
Today, Secretary of State Bellows claimed, falsely — even after Mr. Kebede of the ACLU quoted the provisions of the REAL-ID Act requiring sharing with all other states of the contents of the state’s driver’s license database — that all of this information remains in the state of Maine. Secretary of State Bellows also claimed, also falsely, that the Federal government could not access the national REAL-ID database, SPEXS.
In fact, the SPEXS database is held by AAMVA, not by any Federal or state government agency. The Federal government could obtain access to SPEXS with a search warrant, subpoena, or national security letter directed to AAMVA, the same way it could obtain similar records from any private custodian. That order to AAMVA could include a “gag order” prohibiting AAMVA from disclosing the existence of the order or the release of SPEXS records to Maine, other states, or affected individuals. For all we, Secretary of State Bellows, or anyone in Maine knows, this may already have happened.
Members of the Transportation Committee seemed surprised — understandably — to learn from our testimony and that of other sponsors and supporters of LD 160 that the Maine Bureau of Motor Vehicles already uploaded personally identifying information extracted from all Maine driver’s license records to the SPEXS national ID database in December 2024.
Later in the same hearing, the Transportation Committee heard testimony from some of the same witnesses with respect to LD 1360, a well-meaning but inevitably flawed alternate legislative proposal to require the BMV to maintain the option of a “noncompliant” driver’s license or state ID. The problem with this is that those who get a noncompliant license or ID will think they have opted out of the national ID system, but their information will end up in the same SPEXS national ID database.
Secretary of State Bellows first tried to say that there was no such database, then that it only contained information concerning REAL-ID compliant licenses and IDs, but finally conceded that Maine actually has only one driver’s license and ID database that includes both compliant and noncompliant credentials. Pointers extracted from all records in this state database, including both compliant and noncompliant licenses and IDs, have been and are continuing to be uploaded to SPEXS. And those pointer records, as we pointed out, contain sensitive personal information vulnerable to abuse.
Here’s our 3-minute statement in support of LD 160 (full written submission):
“Data matching” may seem abstract, but its consequences can be life-changing: visa revocation, deportation, sudden cessation of Social Security payments, all without warning or opportunity to present argument or evidence to a human fact-finder.
One of the hallmarks of the new U.S. Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is large-scale algorithmic analysis and comparison of existing databases of personally-identified information. In many cases, algorithms, AI, and data matching are being substituted for human judgement as the basis for decisions about individuals. Similar projects are being carried out by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
These activities appear likely to violate the Privacy Act (including its rarely-enforced criminal provisions) and/or the Computer Matching and Privacy Protection Act.
DOGE’s programmers are working to aggregate and correlate databases that have been compiled by different agencies or commercial third parties such as social media platforms, identified in different ways, and ingested in different formats.
Data matching is central to the methods of DOGE and the Trump 2.0 Administration. One of President Trump’s Executive Orders to heads of all Federal agencies directs that:
Agency Heads shall take all necessary steps, to the maximum extent consistent with law, to ensure Federal officials designated by the President… have full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, data, software systems, and information technology systems… This includes authorizing and facilitating both the intra- and inter-agency sharing and consolidation of unclassified agency records.
How is this working out, and what does this say about ID-linked records?
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) of the US Department of the Treasury has ordered all money transfer agencies and currency exchanges in seven counties in California and Texas along the US-Mexico border to file reports with FinCEN including the identities of the customers engaging in all cash transactions over $200.
Implicit in this order is that would-be customers who are unable or unwilling to provide sufficient evidence of their identity (and to allow that information and the details of their transaction to be passed on to FinCEN) will be denied these financial services.
The Geographic Targeting Order published by FinCEN in the Federal Register last Friday is effective for transactions with financial services businesses in those counties from April 14, 2025, through September 9, 2025. The Bank Secrecy Act, which authorizes such orders, limits them to 180 days but allows them to be renewed an unlimited number of times.
The misleadingly-named Bank Secrecy Act is already subject to abuse as an enabler and pretext for financial surveillance, and already requires reporting of cash transactions of $10,000 or more. But so far as we’ve been able to determine, this order lowering the reporting threshhold to $200 is, even for a geographically limited area, unprecedented.
Other Geographic Targeting Orders have been issued, but typically with much higher threshholds — real estate transactions over $50,000 in Baltimore, for example. Why Baltimore, with a lower threshhold than anywhere else in the US? FinCEN didn’t say.
The new order goes against growing bipartisan calls in Congress to repeal the Bank Secrecy Act or at least raise the threshhold amounts for for customer identification and transaction reporting.
Nothing in the order gives any real justification for its geographic boundaries. More than a million people live in the area covered by the order, but it will actually affect a much larger number of people. Many travellers stop at “Casas de Cambio” on their way to and from border crossings in these counties to exchange cash dollars for pesos and pesos for dollars.
It’s unclear whether the goal of the order is primarily harassment or surveillance. The costs of completing the extra paperwork will undoubtedly drive up currency exchange and remittance fees and waste time for financial service businesses and their customers.
The US State Department is withholding passports from some US citizens, effectively denying them the ability to leave or return to the US, without any basis in law or regulations.
Multiple news outlets have reported that the State Department has ordered its staff in the US and abroad to “suspend” processing of all pending applications for new or renewal US passports or passport cards with an “X” gender marker.
A new page of the State Department’s website suggests that each of these passport applicants will (eventually) be notified that their application has been “suspended” and will remain “suspended” (i.e. that they won’t be issued a passport) unless and until they provide “certain documents and records to help us establish your biological sex”.
The US Department of the Treasury has announced that it plans not to enforce the provisions of the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) that were to go into effect next month requiring owners and principals of all corporations to file copies of government-issued ID credentials, including photos, with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).
The Treasury Department also says it plans to propose revisions to the CTA regulations that would limit the ID-filing requirement to principals of “foreign reporting companies”, a term that doesn’t appear in the statute and isn’t defined in the announcement.
We don’t want the government to try to enforce the CTA reporting requirement. But if the law isn’t going to be enforced, it should be repealed, not left on the books as a Sword of Damocles available to prosecutors to threaten or persecute disfavored businesspeople. And the proposed regulations, redefining which entities must file CTA reports, would appear to be contrary to the explicit language of the CTA statute as to who must file.
Press releases like this one form the Treasury Department aren’t binding on Federal prosecutors, even now, much less in the future. Regardless of this announcement, nobody subject to the CTA is safe from prosecution if they don’t file the reports required by the law.
There are few legal constraints on prosecutorial discretion. Many laws — including those that impose reporting and filing requirements — are routinely ignored and unenforced. Police and prosecutors, especially those with malign intentions, love to have laws like this on the books that everybody violates. That allows anyone to be prosecuted at any time, with the government claiming truthfully that it is merely “enforcing the law”. Only in rare cases is the government required to explain the real reasons why some people are prosecuted while others who are known to have violated the same laws are not.
To word it a little differently, the combination of unlimited prosecutorial discretion and universally violated laws is central to the phenomena of pretextual police action and pretextual prosecution. An essential part of the solution is the repeal of unenforced laws.
We welcome, in the short term, the nonenforcement of CTA reporting rules. And we urge Congress to address the problem, promptly, by repealing the CTA in its entirety.
Thanks to a mutual fan, we were invited to speak about the work of the Identity Project with Alex Newman on the latest edition of The Liberty Report on Patriot.tv and Rumble.
We talked about current and long-term concerns including digital ID, the REAL-ID Act, how demands for ID enable surveillance and control and are being increasingly integrated into a global system of surveillance and control of our movements, and the importance of anonymous cash payment for protection against financial surveillance.
What can be done? We talked about the need for popular vigilance and popular resistance, but also about what the government could do:
If the Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is really concerned about identifying unnecessary and ineffective government programs to cut, they could start with the TSA.
Members of Congress could do their part by reintroducing the Freedom To Travel Act and working to abolish the TSA.
Most importantly, though, we the people can continue to resist these attacks on our freedom.
Thnaks to Alex Newman and his crew for giving us a chance to bring these issues to his listeners and viewers.