From the beginning of 2020 until June 30, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers at the International Mail Facility (IMF) at Chicago’s O’Hare airport have seized 1,513 shipments containing fraudulent documents. The shipments held a total of 19,888 counterfeit U.S. driver’s licenses. The majority of these shipments came from China and Hong Kong, but others originated in Great Britain or South Korea.
CBP reported the details of this fraudulent identify influx in a July 27 news release.
The driver’s licenses named and pictured many different people in different states — with a vast majority being for states neighboring Illinois. Some licenses would share the same picture but have different biographical data. So skillful were the counterfeiters that the bar code attached to the Michigan licenses worked when swiped.
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“These counterfeit driver’s licenses can lead to disastrous consequences,” the release quoted Ralph Piccirilli, the acting area port director for Chicago. “Criminal organizations use these counterfeit IDs to avoid attracting attention to their illegal activities. Our CBP officers were able to identify these very realistic counterfeits and stop them from reaching their destinations.”
CBP noted several crimes that the fraudulent identity documents could be used to commit, including identity theft, worksite enforcement, critical infrastructure protection, and fraud linked to immigration-related crimes such as human smuggling and human trafficking. The release also observed that these documents can be used by terrorists to avoid scrutiny from travel screening measures.
An earlier CBP release in April noted that in the previous six months, CBP officers at DFW Airport had intercepted nearly 900 counterfeit driver’s licenses that were delivered via international shipping services to the Dallas area. More than 2,000 fake IDs had been seized during the previous 18 months.
While all of the potential crimes that CBP predicted might be facilitated through the use of these false IDs are certainly valid, there is one important one that we might add to the mix — illegal voting. As we observed in an article in 2016, even giving legitimate driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, as in California, enables these illegals to register to vote. (California makes it even easier for those who are here illegally by automatically registering them to vote when they obtain or renew their driver’s licenses at the DMV.) While receiving a fraudulent driver’s license would not accomplish such automatic voter registration, it would still provide identification that the illegal alien might show at the voter registrar’s office.
The battle between those who favor voter ID and those who are opposed to it has been fought in several states. Among these is Kentucky, where in April Governor Andy Beshear, a Democrat, said that he was vetoing Senate Bill 2, which clarified Kentucky’s requirements requiring proof of identification in order to vote.
However, with so many fraudulent driver’s licenses in circulation, even having voter ID laws may not guarantee that the identification is legitimate, or that the person presenting it is a citizen entitled to vote.
Photo: Joerg Siegert / iStock / Getty Images Plus
Giving Driver’s Licenses to Illegal Aliens Makes Illegal Voting a Real Possibility
Warren Mass has served The New American since its launch in 1985 in several capacities, including marketing, editing, and writing. Since retiring from the staff several years ago, he has been a regular contributor to the magazine. Warren writes from Texas and can be reached at [email protected].
