chollie

I think we're getting into a gray area here.

It seems to me that the verbiage says that you don't have to be able to produce ID (after all, people do get mugged on vacation), but TSA has to be able to confirm your identity by other means. Obviously, if you're on the return leg of a trip, you probably don't have access to copies of your birth certificate, utility bills, rental agreements, etc. The assumption is that there's enough information in government databases for TSA to cross-examine you. Very early on, there were reports that TSA used voter registration to demand that pax without ID reveal how they were registered to verify their ID.

TSA (agency) or individual TDCs can decide that they can't confirm the identity of a pax without valid ID and refuse entry. There's no way for the pax to refute that, because the process is opaque - and the screeners always have the 'final say'.