REAL ID: A Letter to House Majority Leadership

A policy reduction letter on REAL ID systems and programs directed at legacy partisan leadership.

ATTN: GOP Majority House Leadership c/o

Representative Steven Scalise

Wednesday, May 21, 2025

Dear Representative Steve Scalise,

This is a policy research request per the Republican position on the mission of REAL ID Act law and actual practice. The REAL ID law is being questioned per relevancy upon findings that Afghan parolees and large numbers of poorly vetted asylum parolees are permitted to fly with a mish-mash of parolee documentations, including use of State Department issued asylum statuses/International identity speculation using REAL ID drivers licenses.

Not much is very clear. REAL ID license and international identity credential clearances are a system of wasted credentialism currently undermining the public safety aims of the law. It then duns the American citizenry for DMV manifests for an internal passport to travel in America and to pay for this mosaic chip work of documentations for Biden-era asylum cases.

[This is] DHS’ nearly two-decade history of creating database redundancies and waste collection information as a means to bill the taxpayer for systems. They have rebranded defunded unpopular policy to keep burdensome contractors on the dole. That’s an abuse of resources. There are also policy flaws with given TSA operations and regulatory conditions for asylum parolees that annul the original specific purpose for demand of flyer identity to board an airplane. The latter renders an internal passport for citizens pointless.

It seems like the real purpose of REAL ID is to generate income for a broad variety of identity contractors and a country club of government investors who want to internationalize the American identity article. The burden of international proof of migrant identity belongs with the Department of State not the Department of Homeland Security.

The State Department knows who is a U.S. citizen and by default, they also know who is not a U.S. citizen. Passport contractors and ICAO have been used as counterintelligence tools. That’s not where most of us live. DHS is unprepared for the dopey intrigues of travel manifests hatched by transitory bilateral relations.

DHS is straddling a seemingly deliberate confusion of systems and disparities in ICE and CBP immigration. It then becomes unserious speculation from administration-to-administration. Then of course, solution providers get invited to drop in with advice. Bush chose from George Tenet, Mike Chertoff, and former Stasi police priesthood on population surveillance and movement controls. Those people don’t have the same political capital they did in 2007, but we still live with their systems and their bills. The Tea Party movement did precipitate the REAL ID pork trough environment. This enabled systemists to manufacture things that don’t work, don’t conform to U.S. Constitutional liberties or the Reagan-era way of life a broad majority of American adult taxpayers paid into.

The Trump Administration has a variety of aims that generate some conflicts with expenditures at Homeland Security. While it does seem the Republican diaspora does usually favor all identity mandates, some of the systems are both wasteful and harmfully insecure. DOGE is a rare, remarkable, dispassionate way to capture funding redundancies and harmful programs that defeat American interests by liquidating tax deficit generated capital on unconstitutional or global objectives, like SDGs, DEI and ESGs. I recommend submitting REAL ID systems, polices and lifecycle operations for a DOGE systems FWA audit.

A concreted example of DHS counterterror waste would be the pocket litter and interpersonal terrorism “tattle” infrastructure generated at national Fusion Centers. It’s just aggregate random data that has never been processed for prosecution. It threatens behavioral extortion as non-criminal speculation and beams out as warrantless federal police surveillance. It amasses useless non-linear responses to terrorism. It's become database housing that performs no real function and produces no actionable intelligence leading to an enforcement or prosecutorial action. When someone does report, the police don’t use it. Fusion Centers were defunded by Congress and then redundantly resubmitted for appropriations again under another name. It was passed as an omnibus trojan horse over and over again without any real consumer consent or legitimate use to the American people. Real ID is another such dud.

REAL ID oozed through State-by-State DMVs under Trumps’ policy premise it would be optional as drivers licenses. That manufactured false promise. For example, per ‘promises made promises kept’ the Great State of Texas is out of compliance making all windows mandate the REAL ID. They are wasting the infrastructure as one of the biggest harbors of unlawful aliens nationwide. They have a really high number of laundered international identities on drivers licenses through our State DMVs. Those people can board a plane to fly, while all of my birth articles and passport information has to be clinical to fly. REAL ID has become a contraindicator of legitimacy.

REAL ID should be repealed and replaced with lawmaking that the State Department should take over its functionaries and its aims. I strongly urge the Republican committee to repeal this law and replace it with a bill that focuses on placing identity burden of proof on alien nationals, not the U.S. citizen. Then make the foreign national pay for the infrastructure in bilateral dealing. Trump should find this a reasonable offer.

REAL ID has not proven itself as anything other than a systems boondoggle. It has no real worth other than to create a identity sanitizer for asylum claimants and duplicative systems. Some are disparately secured across all 50 States for a national ID mandate to fly.

I think it really adds an insult to injury that only some Afghan parolees have a REAL ID. So what are the others doing? [Taking a Greyhound buss? IDTS!] If they’re flying anyway, why do Americans have to have an internal passport as a US citizen? Counterterror aims are being undermined by some of these policies.

Unfortunately, this is Republican policy with some immediate tacit agreement from the data brokerage industry and insurance brokers lobbying their interests with AAMVA. The American people don’t owe them anything. Per Trump’s original policy, that’s why it should be optional. I think it would be wise to commit to an investigation into REAL ID opt-out compliance in States motor vehicle license divisions to correct regulatory policies that create unnecessary risk of lawsuits.

The true aim of this request is for the Republican House to admit what isn’t working with REAL ID and to reorganize the mission as a legal repeal & replace effort for REAL ID to make it something that won’t lead to institutional vassal corruption or endless bids for systems waste.

Please let me know if you would consider a waste study directed at Bush-era counterterror systems, threaded through DOGE and House oversight committee of Homeland Security.

Thank you in advance of your considerations. Copies of this letter will be publicly available online and to other lawmakers.

Sincerely,

Sheila Dean
(Still) The 5-11 Campaign, Ad hoc

(310)857-8257

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