Comments on: Sorry About Your Passport, America

By: Nancy

Nancy — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 04:37:14 +0000

“delays just for new passports”? WRONG.
I had to renew/replace my old passport, with extra emphasis on getting my new (old) name re-established after a divorce, and it took OVER 90 DAYS. WITH my existing passport submitted, and all notorized documents in place (birth certificate, marriage license AND freakin’ notorized divorce decree!)

TO SINGLE WOMEN EVERYWHERE : THINK LONG AND HARD BEFORE LEGALLY CHANGING YOUR NAME WITH MARRIAGE. PAUSE, AND THEN, RETHINK IT. WITHOUT THE CHAMPAGNE IN YOUR HAND.

(public service announcement OUT)

By: redseca2

redseca2 — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 17:08:48 +0000

I would never go to SF City Hall for my passport! Would you go to the passport office to pay your SF county property taxes!

In February 2006, long before the current passport crisis, a friend did just that to get his first passport to travel with me to Norway in May, almost 16 weeks away. The clerk at SF City Hall gave him such spectacularly incorrect information, (he told him not to include his birth certificate, all they “needed to see” was his Receipt for the birth certificate; he told him “expediting is a waste of money”; he entered the zip code for City Hall, not for my friends home on the form!!!!) so my friend didn’t get his passport until 48 hours before we left.

By: cd

cd — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 13:38:34 +0000

p.s. last I heard they also are no longer promising any passports within a particular timeline – and they won’t even take fees for expediting anymore, because they can’t expedite anything anyway.

Lastly, for at least a bit longer, passports aren’t required at all for land or sea crossings.

By: cd

cd — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 13:32:16 +0000

The significant delays in passport processing have been ALL OVER THE NEWS since at least April. The rules for needing a passport for travel to Mexico and Canada were first postponed through the end of the summer and now, I believe, won’t be enforced until sometime NEXT summer.

Never underestimate, however, the power of angry, affluent/middle-class travelers to spur policy change almost immediately, however. So many people with cruise tickets, etc.

Try getting them to speed up or suspend rules on other things (like fiance visa processing). Not enough critical mass to fix those processing times.

At any rate, yeah, if you need a passport soon, get a move on. You still might not make it.

But it WAS on the news quite a bit.

By: violet

violet — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 19:59:55 +0000

wow! I really want to thank everyone for the comments, stories and suggestions. hopefully this post can serve as a resource for people navigating the hell of getting a passport, or at least make folks feel less alone and confused. I really appreciate people posting non-government citizen resource links — it’s not like .gov is going to link to WV’s tips anytime soon, though they *should* (and I think most people going through this are like my friend Molly, who is only recently becoming web-savvy).

By: haryone

haryone — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 19:29:12 +0000

Things do change. In 1963 on a Monday afternoon I was told that I had a 3:00pm Friday flight to Japan. My passport had expired and I needed Japanese Visa in the new passport. My father had just retired from the State Department and knew what to do. I phoned the air line and said “you have a problem”.
They told me to send the paperwork Special Deliver to the passport office in Chicago to be expedited and that they would get it to the Japanese Consol in Chicago. Thursday my wife phoned and said that the passport was at home – without a visa. I phoned the airline again. They said to Special Delivery the passport to the Consol. Friday day the Consol handed the passport to a cab driver who handed it to an airline supervisor on the curb at O’Hare. She handed it to the pilot of the next plane out. When I walked up to the counter a pilot walked up behind the agent and called my name, passport in hand. Oh, and Special Delivery worked.

By: vivian

vivian — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 06:27:20 +0000

i applied for a renewal of my passport since it would have expired this month. i applied on the last week of march, but i didn’t actually receive it until a couple weeks ago – almost four months.

i did all the things the site said – call, e-mail, request on passport status. my mom eventually went to the post office to ask about it and found out that since i didn’t put down a date on when i’d need it by, it was set aside for “more important” applications. and apparently, it also depends on where it’s processed – which made a difference as my brother waited about half the time for his passport to arrive.

By: Lauren

Lauren — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 00:35:16 +0000

I had a similar experience in May, and only got back into the country from Canada flying because I brought every single piece of proof that I was a US citizen with me. And if anyone promises that you can make an emergency appointment 3 days before you leave, they’re definitely with the temp agency. The call system at least needs to be changed so it doesn’t automatically hang up on you (which happens more than you get a representative). And not every representative actually knows the rules at the time. Apparently it’s not important that everyone has the same information. I feel less safe knowing that our government is not able to handle a situation like this. This was enacted in 2004, you’d think 3 years would have been enough time to prepare for the surge they knew was coming. Thank God for our troops, or else I wouldn’t feel protected at all. And the only advice I can give is that I got from my husband’s uncle who worked for customs. A US citizen by law cannot be denied entry into our country, even without a passport. It just may take a little longer to get through customs. I wouldn’t use that as your plan for getting back in, but it’s a nice fallback. Worked for me, especially since the system didn’t. (Oh and mine was a renewal, took only 14 weeks, but still longer than the 10 they promised on the website at the time I submitted my renewal.)

By: PHK

PHK — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 20:12:35 +0000

Richard: Thanks for linking to WhirledView.

You’re right: this problem is “old news” and we’ve been writing about it since early February and were mentioned in an front page article in the San Francisco Chronicle as a resource.

Since then, I wrote a tips page (which is what you linked to) which answers a lot of questions to help (as much as possible) people navigate the broken, Byzantine process. We are always interested in hearing from people what has worked for them – and what hasn’t (also what the lines are like at the different Agencies). We’ve found that paying the $60 expedite fee plus fedex shipping does make a major difference in time but that many people did not have gotten their passports just in the nick of time through Congressional help.

By: Richard

Richard — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 17:48:11 +0000

I tend to think of this passport problem as 'old news' because information on how to deal with this problem has been readily available on the web for some time, for instance here: WV Tips for US Passport Seekers: Navigating the Passport Maze http://whirledview.typepad.com/whirledview/passporttips.html And those RFID chips, The ID Chip You Don't Want in Your Passport RFID stands for "radio-frequency identification." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/15/AR2006091500923.html RFID passport logo http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001003.html The upshot of this is a system which is so broken as to require byzantine behavioral changes on our parts as 'citizens' so that we are all more secure. When in fact after standing in line, I think you can understand that this whole effort has been to impart a mechanism to make obtaining passports less secure. And devalues the reason for them in the first place.