Rampant Fraud Discovered in Maryland Driver’s Licenses For Illegal Aliens

A recent audit of the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration (MVA) turned up hundreds of driver’s licenses and ID cards for illegal aliens that were issued based on counterfeit or otherwise fraudulent documents.  This is just the latest example of how giving driver’s licenses to illegal aliens is one fraud that invariably leads to more fraud.  It also shows just how inaccurate and dishonest the euphemism “undocumented” really is.  Illegal aliens have plenty of documents, many of which are fake.

In 2013, Maryland passed a law creating a category of driver’s licenses and ID cards that are specifically for illegal aliens.  By August of 2016, MVA had issued more than 82,000 of them.

These so-called “non-compliant” or “second-tier” licenses display the phrase “Not Acceptable For Federal Purposes” across the top of the card.  Getting one is supposed to require providing proof of name, identity, age and Maryland residency to the MVA, as well as proof of two years paying Maryland state income tax or being claimed as a dependent.

To prove name, identity and age, an illegal alien is supposed to provide “a valid, unexpired passport or a valid unexpired consular ID document,” but if they can’t, they can provide any two of a list of ten documents as long as at least one has a photo less than eight years old, and the last item on that list is “[a]ny other documents adopted as acceptable by the Administration through written approval.” The list of documents allowable to prove residency is even longer.  Plus they can also “submit documentation issued by a court, governmental body, or other entity acceptable to the Administration” to show a change of name.

However, even if the illegal alien can’t provide any of those documents, the MVA then has a whole other separate “exception process” for them, where they can claim “circumstances beyond the applicant’s control” if they say they’re a dependent, married, a resident of a nursing home, homeless, “physically incapacitated” or even an inmate or former inmate of a jail, prison or juvenile detention facility.

So the license or ID card, which serves primarily to help the illegal alien defraud the American public by making the already fraudulent act of being present in the United States even easier, has an application process that is itself a roadmap for even more fraud.

It should come as no surprise then, that the document most often found by the audit to have been fraudulently used in applications was a comptroller’s letter used to prove the two-year tax payment requirement: “a single comptroller letter was used repeatedly to get 16 different driver’s licenses or ID cards.  In more than 100 separate cases, the names used to get driver’s licenses or ID cards did not match the identification number on the comptroller’s letter. The same residence was used for 40 driver’s licenses.”  Different illegal aliens can apparently provide their own individual proof of identity and residence, real or otherwise, but “proving” they actually paid taxes seems to have taken particular and coordinated effort.

As even Maryland State Senator Craig Zucker of sanctuary Montgomery County admitted, “[w]e don’t know who those people are and what they’re doing with those IDs.”  He’s right about that.  One fraud just leads to more fraud.  The auditors made five specific recommendations, but they left out the most obvious one: for Maryland to stop issuing driver’s licenses to illegal aliens.