http://www.nilc.org/immlawpolicy/cdev/congrssdev018.htmSensenbrenner also has asserted that the 9/11 terrorists were able to carry out their attacks because, collectively, they were able to obtain 63 state driver’s licenses. His claim has been widely circulated by anti-immigration groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform and in Congress. But the claim is contradicted by both a 9/11 Commission staff report and a fact sheet recently issued by the 9/11 Public Discourse Project (9/11 PDP), a nationwide public education campaign created by the ten members of the 9/11 Commission (a description of the 9/11 PDP can be found on its website: www.9-11pdp.org).
The fact sheet makes clear that the claims Sensenbrenner has made about the number of licenses the hijackers obtained before 9/11 and the conclusions he draws from their use by the hijackers are both incorrect. The fact sheet reports that, in fact, the hijackers obtained only 13 (not 63) driver’s licenses, and that 2 of those were duplicates. According to the fact sheet, they also had 21 U.S.A.- or state-issued ID cards. However, the fact sheet itself is somewhat misleading in including so-called U.S.A. ID cards in this number. These are not government-issued ID cards; they are cards made by a private company that sells deceptively real–looking ID cards. So the number of government-issued ID cards was actually somewhat lower than the number cited by the commission and far lower than the number cited by Sensenbrenner.
According to the 9/11 PDP fact sheet, all the terrorists’ driver’s licenses were legal, although not all were legally obtained. At least five of the hijackers obtained their licenses by falsely stating that they were residents of the state that issued them. All the hijackers entered the U.S. with valid immigration documents, so a law preventing undocumented immigrants from obtaining licenses would have had no effect on the hijackers’ ability to obtain licenses.