The father of this 20-year-old man got the appointment in extremis. “I don’t know how he did it!” he said after leaving the New York Passport Agency, where he has to return to pick up the document in a few hours before going to the airport and taking a flight to the British capital, then having had to change the itinerary.
Dozens of people wait in the long line, by appointment, at the gates of the official center. Some have to travel for urgent reasons, such as the death of a family member, a business trip or the long-awaited vacation, in the middle of summer in the northern hemisphere.
Linda (she did not want to give her last name), 46, began the procedures to renew the passports of the entire family (four in total), in April.
Hers and her husband received them by mail in June, but not her children’s, she says desperately, one day before starting her vacation in Aruba, in the Caribbean, which she hopes not to lose.
“This procedure has never worked like now,” she says angrily.
For David Alwadish, the founder of the service agency itseasy.com, which carries out procedures such as obtaining passports and visas, what is being experienced is an “ugly perfect storm” that has caused many people to miss flights, vacations or trips of business.
“It’s like the entire United States has decided to renew their passport and travel somewhere!” he says. “In 40 years (in the business), I hadn’t seen anything like it,” she says.
In his opinion, the avalanche of requests for passports It has been added to the lack of personnel -who during the covid was transferred to other services-, and the installation of a system to renew the passport online that does not allow compliance with security requirements, which has caused its temporary suspension.
Last March, the State Department warned that getting a new passport or renewing it would take between 10 and 13 weeks and between seven and 9 if done fast track at an additional cost of $60, to $190 per document. Almost twice as long as before the pandemic.
So far this year, an average of 500,000 applications per week have been received, 30% more than the previous year when 22 million passports were issued, according to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
unprecedented demand
It is an “unprecedented demand”, which meets the need to “rebuild” a service that was practically dismantled during the covid, Blinken acknowledged.
His department asked citizens to “verify the expiration date of the document and renew it” as soon as possible, as the summer holidays approached.
Many countries require a validity of more than six months to undertake the trip, recalls Alwadish, who charges 940 dollars for a service to obtain a passport in one day, although in the market they can pay 2,500 dollars for a procedure or 1,500 to obtain an appointment that is free.
Violetta Stevans (not her real name), 60, had to cancel her flight to Europe scheduled for July 1 because after 15 days of trying to get an appointment, all she was offered was one in Puerto Rico and one in Texas.
“For two weeks I called and called to get an appointment. Even when I called at 8:00 in the morning, they told me that there was none,” he said in the long line that is forming at the entrance of the passport service of the Gran Apple.
Blinken hopes that these problems will be resolved when the online service is fully operational, as it expects 60% of renewals to be done online.
