PropertyValue
?:author
?:datePublished
  • 2022-03-16 (xsd:date)
?:headline
  • Does TSA Allow 'Illegal Immigrants' To Use Arrest Warrants as ID? (en)
?:inLanguage
?:itemReviewed
?:mentions
?:reviewBody
  • Republican U.S. senators have taken action against a reported allowance by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), that permits travelers residing the U.S. illegally to use civil arrest warrants as a form of identification to board a plane. In February 2022, Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin introduced legislation to prevent the TSA from allowing this form of identification. The bill, titled Prohibiting the Use of Arrest Warrants for Identification at Security Check-points Act of 2022, calls for the prohibition of the use of a number of specific documents as identification, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Form I–200 (Warrant for Arrest of Alien), and ICE Form I–205 (Warrant of Removal/Deportation). Snopes reached out to Johnson’s office, which sent us an exchange between Rep. Lance Gooden, R-Texas, and the TSA in which the latter shared a detailed document listing permissible items of identification: ... in coordination with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) counterparts, TSA established a process where it will accept certain DHS-issued forms for non-citizens and non-U.S. nationals who do not otherwise have acceptable forms of ID for presentation at security checkpoints. In a list on page 3, the TSA acknowledges the following forms are acceptable at checkpoints: Johnson has described this practice as allowing known criminals to fly on U.S. aircrafts, and as a threat to homeland security. An article on the Fox News website by Rep. Roger Williams, R-Texas, with the headline Biden’s TSA rewards criminal behavior by giving illegal immigrants freedom to fly, added: According to TSA, over 44,000 illegal aliens’ arrest warrants were validated as acceptable ID at U.S. airports between January to October 2021. The TSA's letter to Gooden did confirm that they validated the DHS-issued documentation of 44,957 passengers from Jan. 1, 2021 to Oct. 31, 2021. However, describing the acceptance of these documents as rewarding criminal behavior misrepresents the actual status of these otherwise undocumented travelers. While these forms are indeed arrest warrants, they are not the same kind of arrest warrant issued in criminal cases. A TSA spokesperson released the following statement differentiating these documents (emphasis ours): The American Immigration Council, a nonprofit advocacy group, confirms that these immigration violations are civil, not criminal infractions: The I-200 and I-205, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), are not signed by a judge, as would be typical in the case of a criminal arrest warrant: ICE is required to attach these forms to any request to hold a person who has violated U.S. immigration and visa policies. Furthermore, according to PolitiFact, the TSA has allowed these same forms to be accepted for identification purposes since 2019. While the TSA is allowing the aforementioned forms as identification at checkpoints, they are not arrest warrants as commonly understood -- i.e., they are not issued for criminal behavior, nor are they signed by a judge. We thus rate this claim as a Mixture. (en)
?:reviewRating
rdf:type
?:url