WASHINGTON (AP) — Want a valid US passport for travel this year? Well get ready, because you’re about to embark on a very different odyssey, long before you even set foot in an airport.
The backlog of orders for US passports has hit a bureaucratic wall as global travel rebounds to pre-pandemic levels without enough staff to keep up with high demand. The result, say frustrated travelers in the United States and other parts of the world, is maddening purgatory perhaps best defined as costly uncertainty.
Passport applicants describe a slow agony of waiting, worrying, standing in line, refreshing the website, writing to Congress, paying onerous fees and following instructions that turn out to be incorrect. Some applicants are buying additional tickets to obtain passports in other cities, before making the originally planned trip.
The picture is so bleak that officials do not deny or offer forecasts of when this will end. They attribute it to the shortage of personnel that comes from the pandemic and the suspension of online processes this year. That has left the passport agency with a record 500,000 applications per week and on track to surpass 22 million passports issued last year, the State Department says.
It was early March when Ginger Collier, a florist who lives near Dallas, applied for four passports for a family vacation in late June. The agent in charge, Collier says, estimated a waiting period of between eight and 11 weeks, meaning she would have their passports a month before traveling. Long enough, Collier thought then.
So the State Department updated its estimates and said it would be 13 weeks. We’ll still be fine, she thought.
With two weeks to go until the trip, “I couldn’t sleep anymore,” says Collier. If the passports did not arrive, the family would lose $4,000 and the chance to meet one of their sons, who was studying in Italy. “I was on edge thinking I won’t be able to see it,” Collier recalls. She called the phone number listed every day, sometimes waiting up to 90 minutes to be told—at best—that she could get an appointment in some other state.
“I don’t have the money to pay for another four tickets to go to another part of the United States to get a passport, when I applied early enough,” Collier says.
By March, frustrated travelers began demanding answers, calling their representatives in the House and Senate, who during recent hearings said they received more complaints about passport delays than any other issue.
The Secretary of State had an answer, in a way.
“With covid, the system basically collapsed,” Antony Blinken explained before a congressional committee on March 23. When demand for airfare all but disappeared during the pandemic, he said, the government laid off contractors and reassigned employees who were in charge of issuing passports.
At about the same time, the government suspended the online renewal system “to modify and improve it,” Blinken said. He added that the department is hiring officers as quickly as possible, making more appointments and coming up with other strategies to deal with the crisis.
Scores of people took to social media, calling hotlines and their congressmen to demand answers, ask for advice and plead for help.
At US consulates abroad, the situation is not much better.
One day in June, a resident of New Delhi had to wait 451 days for a US visa interview, according to the website. In Sao Paulo the waiting time is 600 days, while in Mexico City it is 750 days and in Bogotá it is 801.
In Israel, the need is particularly acute. More than 200,000 people with dual Israeli-American nationality live in that country.
Batsheva Gutterman began looking for passport appointments immediately after giving birth in December so she could attend her sister’s July wedding in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her wait for three passports stretched from January to June, ending just days before her flight, and only after she paid a fee to join a WhatsApp group that alerted her to available appointments.
In the end, he was granted three appointments on three consecutive days, for bureaucratic reasons.
“This makes me extremely uneasy, having a baby in Israel, being an American citizen, knowing there’s no way I can travel with my baby unless I get lucky with a date,” Gutterman says.
There appeared to be some progress: The wait time for an appointment to renew a passport was 360 days on June 8 and had dropped to 90 days by July 2, according to the website.
In the United States, Marni Larsen of Holladay, Utah, was in line in Los Angeles, California, on June 14, to apply for a passport for her son. They wanted to travel to Europe to join the rest of the family, who had already left for Europe for a long-planned vacation.
She had applied for her son’s passport two months before and spent several weeks calling or checking the website. As the flight date approached in mid-June, she called the office of Senator Mitt Romney, where one of four people assigned to the matter was able to find the document in New Orleans.
The document would go to Los Angeles, where she made an appointment to pick it up. This meant that Larsen had to buy new tickets for her and her son to Los Angeles and reroute their trip from there to Rome, assuming the passport would be in Los Angeles as promised.
“We’re here standing in a line with this bunch of people,” Larsen said. “This has been a nightmare.”
They did it. And as for Ginger Collier, she too had a happy ending. “I just got the passports!” she texted her. She had to spend seven hours in the passport office in Dallas and return the next day, but in the end she received the passports four days before the flight.
“What a ridiculous process,” Collier said. Despite everything, the reunion with her son in Italy was sweet. Last week she sent a text message: “It was the best hug in the world!”
