How Real ID can exclude ‘real’ Americans from flying, voting and more

At 98, my father’s paper trail was long — in addition to his U.S. birth certificate, there were his discharge papers from his service in the Army Air Corps during World War II, his house deed, his children’s birth certificates, his Social Security, Medicare and business cards.

Yet in 2023, when he applied for a Real ID identification card, a security-enhanced, federally accepted form of identification that airports require as of this month, his application was declined because the names on his passport (Vicente) and driver’s license (Vince) didn’t match. Instead, he was issued a California Senior Citizen Identification Card — which wouldn’t let him board a flight, enter a secured federal building or register to vote.  

My father’s succession of names testifies to the ways American culture coerces and seduces both natives and newcomers to comply with its norms, promising social and political inclusion and upward social mobility. But paradoxically, that same evolution, which pushed him from Vicente to Vince, from “Mexican” to American, rendered him effectively “undocumented” with his declined Real ID application.

Born in Nogales, Arizona, to Mexican immigrants in 1924, my father’s first language, like his original first name, was Spanish, a vestige of the viceroyalty of New Spain and the Republic of Mexico in southern Arizona. I suspect his American teachers changed his name to Vincent when he was a boy. By the time he was a teenager in East L.A. in the early 1940s, Vincent had morphed into Vince.

“To Vince, a real swell dancer,” his girlfriend, Bea Shapiro, inscribed in his Garfield High School yearbook.  

That my father managed to achieve all that he did in life with little more than his Garfield High diploma evinced not only his fierce work ethic, but also the viability of the American dream in the 20th century. My father began life on the physical and symbolic margin of the nation in a small house that lacked indoor plumbing and ended his career as a senior transportation engineer at CalTrans.

But his declined Real ID application effectively erased that biography, exposing a failure of assimilation, and laying bare Americans’ vulnerability to disenfranchisement, regardless of their distance from the immigration experience or their status as U.S. citizens. 

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, has brought that vulnerability into relief. Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the legislation requiring Americans to provide documentary proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote. The bill’s supporters, nearly all Republicans, maintain that it will help “restore public confidence in elections.” Even though citizenship is already a requirement to vote in federal elections and cases of noncitizens voting are statistically rare, President Trump has made the baseless claim that Democrats have recruited noncitizens to vote against him. 

The “illegal alien” voter is a phantasm, but voter suppression is real — and the SAVE Act threatens to further disenfranchise voters. More than 140 million U.S. citizens don’t have a passport, and more than 21 million don’t have a passport or birth certificate that’s “readily available.” Not unlike my dad, some 69 million women who’ve taken their spouse’s name don’t have a birth certificate matching their legal name. Only 18% of respondents to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey had successfully changed the name on their birth certificate so that it aligned with their other documents. And because the SAVE Act mandates that prospective voters present documentary proof of U.S. citizenship at their local election office, isolated rural voters and anyone who doesn’t or can’t drive — young adults, older people, voters with certain disabilities — risk disenfranchisement. 

My father died before Real ID went into effect, so he never had to suffer the injustice of being turned away at a polling station or an airport, or, worse, of being deported because he lacked the right document. Still, his inability to get a Real ID is a warning of the limits, federal and otherwise, that millions of real Americans may now face.

This commentary was adapted from an essay produced for Zócalo Public Square.