The 109 th Congress has considered several immigration issues carried over from the 108 th Congress, providing the impetus for the REAL ID Act of 2005. During the 108 th Congress, a number of proposals were made to strengthen identification-document security and make more stringent requirements for alien admissibility and continuing presence within the United States. Immigration and identification-document security proposals were considered in the context of implementing recommendations of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the 9/11 Commission) to improve homeland security, and some of these were enacted under the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. However, Congress did not include all discussed proposals, certain document-security provisions being notable among them. At the time that the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act was enacted, some congressional leaders reportedly agreed to revisit some of the dropped immigration and document-security proposals in the 109 th Congress. The REAL ID Act of 2005 was first introduced as H.R. 418 by Representative James Sensenbrenner on January 26, 2005, and passed the House, as amended, on February 10, 2005, on a vote of 261-161. House-passed H.R. 418 contained a number of provisions related to immigration reform and document security that were considered during congressional deliberations on the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, but which were ultimately not included in the act's final version. House-passed H.R. 418 also included some new proposals. The text of House-passed H.R. 418 was subsequently added to H.R. 1268 , the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense, the Global War on Terror, and Tsunami Relief, 2005, which was introduced by Representative Jerry Lewis on March 11, 2005, and passed the House, as amended, on March 16, 2005 on a vote of 388-43. H.R. 1268 passed the Senate on April 21, 2005, as amended, on a vote of 99-0, but did not include the REAL ID Act provisions, and a conference was held to resolve differences between the House- and Senate-passed versions of H.R. 1268 . The conference report, H.Rept. 109 - 72 , passed the House on a vote of 368-58 on May 5, 2005, and the Senate on a vote of 100-0 on May 10, 2005. The REAL ID Act, as amended, was enacted into law on May 11, 2005 as P.L. 109 - 13 , Division B. The version of the REAL ID Act enacted into law contains most of the provisions found in House-passed version of H.R. 418 and the version of H.R. 1268 that originally passed the House. However, some notable changes were made, including, inter alia , (1) removing provisions relating to the release of aliens in removal proceedings on bond; (2) making asylum and withholding of removal eligibility and credibility standards less stringent than those proposed in earlier versions of the REAL ID Act; (3) providing for limited judicial review of Secretary of Homeland Security decisions to waive certain legal requirements to facilitate the construction of barriers at the borders; (4) providing broader waiver authority to the Secretary of State and Secretary of Homeland Security regarding terrorist-related grounds for inadmissibility and removal; and (5) modifying, and in some cases making more stringent, REAL ID Act provisions concerning minimum security standards for state-issued drivers' licenses and personal identification cards accepted for federal purposes This report analyzes the major provisions of the REAL ID Act of 2005, as enacted. It describes relevant law prior to passage of the REAL ID Act relating to immigration and document-security matters, and discusses how the REAL ID Act altered preexisting law. The 9/11 Commission Report documented instances where terrorists had exploited the availability of humanitarian relief under immigration law. Although the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) amended asylum procedures to reduce fraudulent claims and limited judicial review of removal orders, provisions in the REAL ID Act again amend the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to further diminish the prospect of terrorists using the immigration system to their advantage. Section 208(b) of the INA provides that the Attorney General may grant asylum to an alien whom he determines is a refugee as defined in § 101(a)(42)(A) of the INA. That section defines a refugee as a person who is persecuted or who has a well-founded fear of persecution because of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. An alien who is physically present or arrives in the United States, regardless of the alien's immigration status, may apply for asylum. Although the burden of proof had not been explicitly described in the INA prior to the enactment of the REAL ID Act, regulations at 8 C.F.R. § 208.13(a) and (b) placed the burden of proof on the asylum applicant, as did previous statutory provisions. Also, case law had placed the burden of proof on the asylum applicant. The grant of asylum is discretionary, and even if an applicant meets the burden of proof for asylum eligibility, asylum may be denied on discretionary grounds. Prior to the enactment of the REAL ID Act, there had been no explicit standards in the INA for determining the credibility of an asylum applicant and the necessity for corroborating evidence of applicant testimony. In the absence of explicit statutory guidelines, standards for determining credibility and sufficiency of evidence evolved through the case law of the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) and federal courts. However, these standards were not necessarily consistent across federal appellate courts, arguably yielding different results in otherwise apparently similar cases. Generally, an asylum adjudicator could base an adverse credibility finding on factors such as the demeanor of the applicant or witness, inconsistencies both within a given testimony and between a given testimony and other testimony and evidence (which may include country conditions, news accounts, etc. ), and a lack of detail or specificity in testimony. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (Ninth Circuit) had held that an adjudicator must make explicit the reasons for an adverse credibility finding or the court will accept the applicant's testimony as credible. An adverse credibility finding could be based in part but not solely on an applicant's failure to provide corroboration. The Ninth Circuit had held that where there is reason for an adjudicator to question the applicant's credibility and the applicant fails to provide easily obtainable corroborating evidence with no explanation for such failure, an adverse credibility finding will withstand judicial review. With regard to sufficiency of the evidence, the BIA and the federal courts had agreed that credible testimony alone may suffice to sustain the applicant's burden of proof in some cases, but disagreed on when credible testimony alone meets the burden and when corroboration is needed. The BIA standard had been that where it would be reasonable to expect corroboration, it would have to be provided or an explanation for failure to provide it would have to be given. However, some circuits criticized the BIA for failing to articulate what corroboration it expected in particular cases and why. The Ninth Circuit had adopted a standard that an applicant's credible testimony alone always sufficed to sustain the burden of proof of eligibility where it was unrefuted, direct, and specific. One authority argued that the BIA's approach was contrary to international standards under which an asylum applicant should be given the benefit of the doubt, given the difficulties in obtaining corroborating evidence, although the applicant should try to provide any available corroborating evidence. On the other hand, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit asserted that the BIA standards were consistent with international standards because an applicant is supposed to try to provide corroboration for his or her claim or satisfactorily explain its absence. Prior to the enactment of the REAL ID Act, an alien who was inadmissible on certain terrorist grounds or who was removable for engaging or having engaged in terrorist activities was not eligible for asylum. Not foreclosed from relief was a person who was inadmissible as a member of a terrorist organization, the spouse or child of a person inadmissible on terrorist grounds, or a person who was a representative of a terrorist organization when the Attorney General determined that there were not reasonable grounds for regarding the representative as a danger to the security of the United States. As discussed below, however, changes made elsewhere in the REAL ID Act more broadly restrict the availability of asylum to those with terrorist ties. Subsection 101(a) of the REAL ID Act amends § 208(b)(1) of the INA by clarifying that the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Attorney General both have authority to grant asylum, and strengthens and codifies the standards for establishing a well-founded fear of persecution. These changes address the asylum process generally. Changes made by the REAL ID Act that specifically affect the eligibility for asylum of aliens associated with terrorist organizations are discussed elsewhere in this report. Although the Homeland Security Act of 2002 and Reorganization Plan under that act generally provided for the transfer of the functions of the defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to the Department of Homeland Security, most provisions of the INA still refer to the Attorney General and/or Commissioner of the INS. Both the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Attorney General may now exercise authority over asylum depending on the context in which asylum issues arise, and § 101(a)(1) and (2) of the REAL ID Act accordingly amends § 208(b)(1) of the INA to insert references to both the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security. However, this amendment only addresses references for that particular subsection and does not amend the rest of § 208, which continues to refer only to the Attorney General. It is not clear whether this omission was intended to limit the authority of the Secretary with respect to changes in asylum status or procedures for considering asylum applications.