The Biden Administration is exempting many illegal aliens from the Transportation Security Agency's government photo ID rules for airline travel, giving them special permissions to board planes without a passport or other photo ID.
TSA officials reportedly say they are confident the background screenings that U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials are doing before aliens are allowed on U.S. domestic flights is ensuring security, however, Mark Morgan, the former Acting Commissioner of USCBP under President Trump is not so sure of that; he stated:
I'm sure CBP is doing as much due diligence as possible. But when you have 180,000 people crossing a month and many don't have the official travel documents normally needed to ensure identity, there is only so much you can do.
Currently, all Americans are required to provide TSA a government-issued photo ID, ideally a Real ID despite the federal government’s continued extension of enforcing the program. Other means of identification accepted by TSA include a state-issued driver's license, a passport, Homeland Security trusted traveler card, a green card, or a Department of Defense ID.
TSA officials explain that CBP officials will make calls to consulates and embassies when migrants are detained illegally crossing the border without official IDs in an effort to confirm the aliens’ identities before allowing them to take a flight inside the U.S.
TSA press secretary Sarah Rodriguez told Just the News:
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has an established process to verify the identity of undocumented individuals who have received immigration documents from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and are ticketed for travel on a commercial airline.
Mark Morgan, again, expressed hesitation towards the TSA press secretary’s explanation, adding that such a system is only as good as the information provided by host countries.
If you are calling a Cuba or a Venezuela or a Sudan consulate, can we really be sure? I don't think so. We are abandoning every single security norm we learned after 9/11 just to move illegal aliens through the country.
TSA officials were unable to provide Just the News a total number of migrants who were allowed to board planes without the normally required IDs, saying it is a statistic they do not readily track.
