REAL IDs enforced at airports starting May 7th

By Ben McCarthy

After 20 years, and multiple delays, Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, affirmed this week that REAL IDs will be required to board all domestic flights, beginning May 7th. All passengers without a REAL ID (or passport) will be prevented from boarding flights.
Residents of Missouri and Kansas have been scrambling in recent weeks to make sure their Driver’s License is compliant with a law that was passed 20 years ago by Congress. While REAL IDs will continue to be issued after May 7th, local officials have seen many older residents treating it as a hard deadline and flooding their offices with inquiries.

“We have a lot of confused and misinformed people lining up every morning outside the office,” Shirley Turner, Manager of Belton’s License Office said. “I have three women working full time trying to handle the crowd from 8am to close at 5pm – we’re lucky to get out by 6pm.”

Turner, who’s been at the Belton office for 30 years, argues that most older residents, especially those who don’t fly domestically, have no need to rush to get their driver’s license switched to the new REAL ID-compliant driver’s license. The other areas affected are federal facilities, such as military bases, and nuclear power plants.

The REAL ID Act was signed into law on May 11th, 2005 by President George W. Bush with the stated intent of enhancing national security in the aftermath of the Sept. 11th, 2001, terrorist attacks. The Act was to set new federal standards for issuing identification cards, like driver’s licenses. There have been multiple delays through the years, with a deadline that included 2020, that ended up getting postponed due to concerns associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. That pushed the enforcement deadline to May 3, 2023, but that too was delayed in December 2022 to its current May 7 deadline.

Opposition to REAL ID, while robust at the time of its signing into law, has waned significantly as the years wore on. Esmie Tseng, Communications Director for the ACLU of Kansas, says they have not prioritized the issue, but points to the national ACLU office as still taking a firm position against the REAL ID Act. Their statement says, when fully implemented, the law will: “facilitate the tracking of data on individuals and bring government into the very center of every citizen’s life.” They go on to say that, by definitively turning driver’s licenses into a national ID card it will have a host of other destructive impacts on privacy, and while also imposing significant administrative burdens and expenses on state governments.

Randy Langkraehr, Vice Chair of the Missouri Libertarian Party, says the original purpose of the law has passed, and REAL ID is largely outdated technology at this point.

“The original REAL ID was going to be something that tracked our movements 20 years ago,” Langkraehr said. “Now our cell phones track us much more than anything like REAL ID will do.”

Trish Vincent, Director of the Missouri Department of Revenue, tells the Telegraph the Show Me state is at about 45% compliance (about 2.4 million residents) and hopes that Missourians will utilize their traditional trips to the Driver’s License office to get their REAL ID.