Nineteen men, all foreign nationals, moved through this country on paper the system accepted, and the 9/11 Commission said so in a sentence the trucking industry should have framed. The fix that followed was REAL ID, and it stopped at the DMV counter. On the highway, a driver wanted by Interpol cleared a border, a work permit, a Pennsylvania CDL, and a REAL ID before a Kansas trooper ran his name. That is not an immigration argument. It is an accountability argument and a national security and safety argument.
Every September 11, the country says the names. Two thousand nine hundred and seventy-seven of them, plus the firefighters and police officers who went up the stairs, and the people on the upper floors who went back for someone else. That part should not change, and this piece will not change it.
What gets said less often is what the 9/11 Commission found when it finished looking at how the attack was possible. The nineteen hijackers were all foreign nationals. They entered on visas the State Department issued. Several were in violation of immigration law by the morning of the attack, having overstayed or broken the terms of their admission, and the Commission’s staff counted more than thirty state identification cards and driver’s licenses among them, obtained in Virginia, Florida, and elsewhere through the same notary forms and address affidavits anyone could use. The Commission’s monograph on terrorist travel put the problem in one line: “For terrorists, travel documents are as important as weapons.”
The government answered that finding. The Department of Homeland Security was assembled out of twenty-two agencies. TSA took over the checkpoints. The REAL ID Act of 2005 set a federal floor for what a state license must prove before it counts, and after twenty years of extensions, it was finally enforced at the airport gate this past May. The logic was simple. Know who is in front of you, and most of the rest follows.
The highway never got that memo, and the record proves it three ways: with names that are not names, with names nobody checked, and with credentials the government now says should never have existed.
Start with the placeholders. Federal registration data still carries commercial driver’s licenses and company officers recorded under strings that mean “we do not know.” No Name Given is the phrase USCIS inserts when an applicant’s document carries a single name, and it flows downstream into state licenses, into FMCSA’s carrier census and onto the road. Its cousins are FNU for first name unknown, LNU for last name unknown, and NFN for no first name. A review of the carrier census this summer counted 250 active company officers recorded as No Name Given, 172 as FNU, 26 as NFN, and 34 as LNU, more than 480 people responsible for motor carriers whose recorded identity is a stand-in. In October 2025, ICE agents at a highway inspection in Oklahoma took a driver into custody whose New York commercial license had been issued in the name “No Name Given Anmol.” That is not a typo on an immigration form. It is the name the State of New York printed on a credential to operate a combination vehicle.
The courts have seen this before. In 2011, the Second Circuit decided an appeal captioned United States v. FNU LNU, brought by a woman who flew into JFK on someone else’s passport and was tried, convicted, and appealed without the government ever learning her name. A federal court can convict a person it cannot identify. FMCSA can let the same string haul freight.
Then the names nobody checked. On November 9 of last year, Kansas authorities pulled over a commercial truck and found the driver, Akhror Bozorov, 31, was the subject of an Interpol notice out of Uzbekistan, where a warrant had been issued in late 2022 accusing him of recruiting for a jihadist group and distributing its propaganda online. According to DHS, he crossed the southern border in February 2023, was apprehended and released, received work authorization in January 2024, and was issued a Pennsylvania commercial driver’s license on July 25, 2025. It was REAL ID compliant. Four checkpoints, four misses, and he applied at every one of them under his own name, the same name on the warrant. The system had his footprint the entire time. Nobody read it.
Bozorov is the case that gets the headlines because of the word terrorism, but the mechanism is ordinary. It is the same mechanism that let a California DMV employee in Victorville enter fraudulent written and driving scores for at least 185 applicants at $1,500 apiece until she was sentenced to five years in 2022. It is the same mechanism this desk reported yesterday, in which a restaurant owner, two government clerks, and access to a federal database put 124 people behind the wheel with CDLs nobody earned. And it is the mechanism behind the 110 training providers DHS and DOT pulled from the federal registry on August 31, a registry that has never inspected a school before listing it, because listing is self-certification. Every driver who trained at one of those schools now holds a credential built on a record that no longer exists.
Then the government says those credentials should not have existed. On the Florida Turnpike in August 2025, Harjinder Singh made an illegal U-turn through a median crossover with a semi, and three people died. He held a non-domiciled CDL. The case led the FMCSA to order states the following month to pause issuing non-domiciled licenses to drivers on temporary visas, citing public safety. A federal court has since blocked that rule, and the Secretary of Transportation has said he will challenge the ruling. Whatever the courts decide, the underlying question is the Commission’s question: did the issuing state know who it was licensing, and could it find and hold that person accountable afterward?
The federal government reached the same conclusion about trucks that it reached about airplanes, and it reached it early. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing was carried out in a rental van. Oklahoma City was a rental truck. After September 11, Congress wrote into the PATRIOT Act that no state could issue or renew a hazardous materials endorsement on a commercial license without a federal security threat assessment, and TSA has run that check since 2005: fingerprints, an FBI criminal history search, an immigration status check, and a screen against the terrorist watchlists. Since 2003, hazmat carriers have been required to hold written security plans and train their drivers on them. TSA’s surface division extends parts of that regime to passenger coaches in designated areas. The vehicles that killed people in Nice in 2016, on the West Side Highway in 2017, and on Bourbon Street this past New Year’s Day were not hazmat loads; they were ordinary trucks driven by people whose names were known. The government’s answer to that risk, across two decades and both parties, has been the same every time: know who is driving.
Which makes the hazmat check the sharpest test of the whole argument. The endorsement screen is only as good as the identity that walks into the enrollment center. A threat assessment run on No Name Given returns no name. A fingerprint check on a man whose Interpol notice was never queried at the border returns a clean card, which is what Pennsylvania issued Bozorov, REAL ID and all. And the security training the carrier’s plan requires sits on top of an entry-level training system that just lost 110 providers in a day because none of them had ever been inspected, on top of a licensing system in which a DMV clerk sold 185 passing scores and a restaurant owner with database access minted 124 credentials. Security training for a driver who never took the training the card says he took is a checkbox, not a control.
None of this says the next attack comes off a loading dock. It says the country decided in 2001 that a commercial vehicle in the wrong hands was a national security problem, built a check for the most dangerous cargo, and left that check standing on a hollowed-out foundation.
That’s what the loud version of this debate gets wrong. Accountability runs on footprints, not passports. Timothy McVeigh was born in New York and murdered 168 people in Oklahoma City, and the country had him in custody within ninety minutes of the blast because he had a record: a license, a rental agreement, a truck axle with a VIN. Bozorov had a footprint too. It was sitting in an Interpol database under his own name while three separate agencies signed off on him. The failure was never that he was foreign. The failure was that the record existed and the process did not read it. The two problems meet at the placeholder: a driver credentialed under No Name Given, employed by a carrier whose officer is FNU at a mailbox store with 135 other registrations, has no footprint to read. When the worst day comes, no one can hold him, and if he has no ties here, there may be no one to extradite him either.
This week’s front page is what that looks like on the road. In Brossard, Quebec, a driver playing a game on his phone drove a semi into a construction zone on Highway 30 and killed a mother and her son; four years later, he was sentenced to six years. In Pleasant Township, Ohio, Brenda Watson, 50, died on the shoulder of U.S. 68 on September 2 while the federal government was posting a cartoon about truck drivers instead of a crash report. A bus company dissolved in January was still on the road when it crashed into Hamline. Thursday night on Interstate 81 in Frederick County, a tractor-trailer loaded with oxygen cylinders burned in the median while sheriff’s deputies did CPR on a patient between their own burning cruisers, at the same mile marker where a crossover killed a driver 79 days earlier. In each of those, the first question a plaintiff’s lawyer asks is the Commission’s question: who is this person, and can we find him? Too often the answer from the file is a placeholder, a dissolved LLC, or a driver who has already left the jurisdiction.
The Commission’s report ran 567 pages, and Congress passed most of it. The one recommendation that never reached the highway is the simplest one. A credential to operate in this country should prove that the person holding it exists, is who they say they are, and can be found. Twenty-five years ago, the country decided that was the minimum for boarding an airplane with 200 people on it. It has never decided that for the person driving 80,000 pounds past a school bus at 70 miles an hour.
They read the names every year at the memorial. On the highway, the names are the problem. Too many records don't have one.