Yesterday, the FBI arrested Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari for the attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. His arrest marks the 38th successfully thwarted terrorist plot against the United States since 9/11. The FBI, with the help of concerned citizens, should be applauded for stopping the plot before it was able to mature. At the same time, it also highlights key failures of Congress and the Obama Administration in homeland security. According to the FBI, Aldawsari, a 20-year-old Saudi citizen and student at South Plains College in Lubbock, Texas, sent …
USA Today has a great editorial today on the Obama administration’s effort to abandon the 9/11 Commission’s REAL ID recommendation: Four years have passed since Congress enacted an ambitious law, the Real ID Act, to avoid a repeat by making it tougher to obtain a driver’s license fraudulently. Yet compliance remains wildly inconsistent. … Now, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who previously was governor of Arizona, one of the lagging states, is proposing to junk Real ID and replace it with what she says is a practical compromise. But the …
Draft legislation is circulating on the Hill to repeal the REAL ID Act. Passed in 2005, with bipartisan support, the REAL ID Act requires states to assure that any identity cards used for a federal purpose (like passing through a Transportation Security Administration security checkpoint before boarding a plane) be issued only to individuals who are lawfully present in the United States. The law also prompts states to adopt best practices to provide better information protection and combat identity theft, fraud, and trafficking in counterfeit IDs. State compliance with the …
DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano is tentatively scheduled to testify before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee about DHS immigration enforcement policies on May 6, 2009. Given Secretary Napolitano’s novel interpretations of federal law, the Heritage Foundation will be posting a series of questions (and suggested answers) for the Secretary. Past questions can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Does the Obama Administration support the implementation of the Real ID Act? Congress has passed two bills that set Real ID standards for driver’s licenses in all …
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff sat down with a handful of bloggers yesterday to talk about some of the issues facing his department, including completion of the fence along the U.S.-Mexico border, compliance with Real ID and the prospects of immigration reform in 2008. Following his somewhat contentious testimony to Congress yesterday, Chertoff used the interview to dispel myths associated with the Real ID law, which has come under attack from liberals and civil liberties groups who incorrectly call it a national ID. Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) accused …
Once again the president said all the right words. Broken borders are no longer acceptable. Immigration laws have to be enforced. The sanctity of citizenship must be maintained. And America needs the right legal processes to get the workers it needs to fuel economic growth. The White House said the same last year, right before it signed off on a massive “comprehensive” immigration bill that would have achieved none of those goals. The president needed to do more to send the right the signal on the kinds of legislation that …
