“I had a neighbor complain that she had to jump through a surprising number of hoops to get a Real ID license conversion.”
And also my late wife’s experience as a naturalized U. S. Citizen — took three tries although all documents were available and inerrant from the beginning. I still don’t believe any significant number of illegals have been able to acquire Real ID. The fed side of the system would catch a large percentage of counterfeit documents.
Here in WA, it is hard for me to imagine an illegal walking up to the DMV counter and asking for Real ID. Although they can get regular driver’s licenses, doing a Real ID application would be the same as stating they were illegal. Even if the state did nothing (which it wouldn’t), they would be paranoid the the fed would hand the data to immigration since the data is obviously going into the fed system.