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Comment by poplarsol | Hacker News Reader

REAL ID's are issued to non citizens with lawful status at time of issuance. Their presence in the country can subsequently become unlawful.

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If someone is here long enough to obtain a state id, there's no reason to detain them on suspicion of their status having expired, so an unexpired id should be enough to end the encounter.

If they are suspected of some other crime, detain them for that, fine. But no masked goons accosting people because they claim they suspected their immigration status.

The US does not have "legal after being a certain time in the country by any means" laws like some other countries. It's the opposite: the longer you are in the country illegally, the more penalty you accrue. There had been one-off amnesties when people were indeed given legal status for being in the country illegally long enough, but there were only two of those: in 1929 and 1986.

Which has little to do with the procedure we should require when an enforcement officer is presented with a valid state issued id.

I responded to this:

>If someone is here long enough to obtain a state id, there's no reason to detain them on suspicion of their status having expired

It seems like you believe that if somebody had been long enough in a state to obtain a state id then their status in the country is legal forever. In the few states where I've got id it took about a month to get an id - you need to lease some housing and get two bills. But even if it took 50 years to get a state id it would not change anything - a state id is not a proof of legal status in the country. Immigration officers can detain people on reasonable suspicion, which is the same standard that is needed for a traffic stop.

It's right in the quote there. If they have a valid id, suspicion is not enough to continue hassling them.

I guess I believe that we should remove the discretion that you believe the officers have...

I have not seen this in the article, which is mostly focused on strawmanning the Real ID but even it was there, it's just an opinion. The law does not make any exceptions for having a valid ID as far as I know.

Yes, I'm doing the strange thing of talking about what a just, moral society should do rather than interpreting and analyzing the limits of current law.

A just, moral society, would not let people off with violating its laws for decades so it would not need to hunt them down when its citizens got finally fed up.

As far as I'm aware, that's really only in California, and even then isn't as big of an issue as it's made out to be.

In CA, as an LPR you can get a REAL ID, but its expiry is not the default of the REAL ID (like not "5/10 years from issuance of the underlying document like a driver's license" but is "if your LPR expires 2 years from now, then your REAL ID driver's licence also expires two years from now"). So it's only really an accurate statement if there's subsequent status changes to pre-empt the LPR status.

In WA, as I am, as an LPR I cannot get a REAL ID. WA will only issue to citizens.

This seems to be the key point- I just checked my state issued electronic id and it has no connection with citizenship data so it would be useless in establishing citizenship-you still need a birth certificate or similar.

That's beside the point. This is about citizenship, which, once granted, doesn't become forfeit that easily. A fact that one would presume to be prominently stated on an ID document.

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