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 Travel & Outdoors | July 2007 
Passport Backlog Takes Precedence
 Barbara Barrett - McClatchy Newspapers
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| | Neressa Cornwall, a costumer service representative at CIBT, the largest passport expediting company in the country, checks passports that arrive at the company's office in New York. (AP/Mary Altaffer) |
Washington - Even with some emergency elastic added to ease recently tightened rules, thousands of U.S. travelers continue to experience long delays getting passports. The U.S. State Department has made the passport problem among its top priorities, literally, ranking it up with Iraq and just a few other issues.
Since late spring, travelers have been irate over extreme delays in getting or renewing U.S. passports. The culprit: the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, passed by Congress in 2004 but which just took effect Jan. 1. The new law requires travelers returning by air to the U.S. from Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean to have valid passports.
Land travelers were to have the passports by Jan. 1, 2008, but that deadline may be postponed.
To remedy the problem, Congress passed a law this month allowing for the rehiring of retired processors. The federal government waived the passport rule through Sept. 30, allowing air travelers to re-enter the country with a government-issued I.D. and proof they've applied for a passport.
And hundreds of State Department employees - including junior diplomats usually busy with war, famine and the like - have been rerouted to regional passport centers to deal with the clog. The government is paying an estimated $5 million for the workers' travel and hotel costs.
Woes reach congressional level
House and Senate members are frustrated, too.The flood of passport applications sparked delays for all international travelers, which triggered thousands of phone calls to congressional offices. That bothered House and Senate members enough that they started holding hearings.
"It's a perfect mess," said U.S. Rep. Brad Miller of Raleigh, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He questioned State and Homeland Security department leaders in a congressional hearing last month about the passport delays.
So far this year, Miller's district offices in North Carolina have handled about 575 passport requests from irate constituents - more than three times as many as for all of 2006. "It's hard to imagine why Homeland Security did not see this coming and were so totally unprepared for the crush," Miller said.
The State Department said it initially expected 16 million applications this year. It now figures it will receive nearly 18 million.
"Nobody really had any hard data" about the number of Americans who crossed the Mexican and Canadian borders without passports, said Patrick Kennedy, director of management policy at the State Department.
The logjam is enormous. About 2.3 million Americans have applications pending at the nation's processing facilities.
Travelers often have no idea what they've gotten into.
"You don't know. Do you cancel your trip? Do you keep it?" said Ashley Miles, a Rocky Mount newlywed who was trying to get to Aruba in June. The passport agency misspelled her maiden name, Crisafulli, forcing her to start over with the help of Rep. Bob Etheridge's office.
"This is your honeymoon. You get married once," Miles said.
Faced with jammed phone lines and angry congressional members, and eager to protect a function it has carried out since the 18th century, the State Department this month mobilized nearly 400 junior diplomats and would-be diplomats. It pulled them from their regular duties - including work on Sudan, Pakistan and other troubled regions - for duty in Washington, New Orleans or the passport headquarters in Portsmouth, N.H.
Kennedy told a meeting of junior officers July 3 that the State Department has several priorities. "One is Iraq. Another priority is passports," he said.
Work all day, then do it again
On a recent visit to the New Orleans passport agency, boxes of applications were stacked 6 feet high and crammed in a 12th-floor mailroom where workers spend hours each day and night sorting and sending them on to the next step.
Each of the 230 people on staff can process a few hundred passport applications a day. But then the mail truck comes again, dumping more than 10,000 applications on the heaviest days.
"It's like working all day to push a huge rock up a hill and every night it rolls back down; the next day you just have to push it up again," said Phil Pusateri, the customer service manager.
U.S. Rep. David Price, a Chapel Hill Democrat and chairman of the House subcommittee that funds Homeland Security, said the agencies should have been better prepared for the flood of applications.
"It does raise questions about the levels of competence. It's a very bad sign," said Price, whose office has handled nearly 650 passport cases since May. "When a government agency runs into difficulty, it's a reflection on all of government."
Passport Office Tackles a Torrent of Applications
Ryan Lafontaine & Warren P. Strobel - McClatchy News
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New Orleans - For months the employees at the State Department's passport office have been working 14-hour days in a frenzied effort to get a handle on more than 300,000 pending applications.
Each of the 230 staffers can process a few hundred passport applications a day, but with thousands of new requests coming in each morning, their efforts seem hopeless.
"It's like working all day to push a huge rock up a hill and every night it rolls back down; the next day, you just have to push it up again," said Phil Pusateri, a customer service manager at the passport center.
The reasons people need passports can be a simple as a summer vacation or as complicated as a family illness. Legislation passed in 2004 requiring anyone traveling by air to or from Canada, Mexico or the Caribbean to have a valid passport as of January has caused a surge in applications.
Next year the law will require anyone traveling in or out by automobile to have the same credentials.
The State Department predicted that demand for passports would increase from 12 million in 2006 to 16 million this year. Instead, the figure may be close to 18 million.
"Nobody really had any hard data" about the number of Americans who crossed the Mexican and Canadian borders without passports, said Patrick Kennedy, director of management policy at the State Department.
The logjam is enormous. About 2.3 million Americans have applications pending at the nation's processing facilities.
Faced with jammed phone lines and angry Congress members, and eager to protect a function it has carried out since the 18th century, the State Department this month mobilized hundreds of employees. It pulled them off their regular duties for a tour in either New Orleans, the passport facility in Portsmouth, N.H., or in Washington.
In June, the federal government also waived the passport rule through Sept. 30, allowing air travelers to reenter the country with a government-issued I.D. and proof they've applied for a passport.
Kennedy told a meeting of junior officers July 3 that the State Department has several top priorities. "One is Iraq. Another priority is passports," he said.
Brendan Doherty, a foreign affairs officer in Washington, was one of the approximately 50 government loaners who began arriving in New Orleans. By next month nearly 80 loaners will have moved into French Quarter hotel rooms to help ease the passport crisis.
"All of us [loaners] are looking at this as an opportunity to help address something that's become a very large issue for the government and the American people," said Doherty, who will work in New Orleans for about eight weeks before returning to his normal job at the department's Office of War Crimes.
Doherty was working as an adviser to the secretary of state on issues such as how the U.S. should respond to genocide and other war crimes.
Every three or four months he traveled between Washington and eastern Africa, near the Sudan, where more than 200,000 have died and 2.5 million have been made refugees in the last four years during the world's worst genocide since Rwanda.
Other loaners in New Orleans were working in management policy, public affairs, U.N. relations and peacekeeping.
"It's a very diverse group of individuals," Doherty said.
The New Orleans passport office covers the nation's largest geographic region -- the most number of states and territories. Applications from as far away as Iowa and Puerto Rico are processed in New Orleans.
On a recent day, a mail truck dropped off 6,700 new applications -- and that's considered a good day.
"Tuesday is really our big day," Pusateri said. "We usually get about 20,000 or 30,000 applications every Tuesday because they're still coming in over the weekend, but we can't get them until Tuesday."
To deal with the tight space, the native New Orleans employees work a long day shift and the new loaners come in at night to continue the process.
But Kennedy said the department's problem isn't its physical plant. It recently opened a facility in Hot Springs, Ark., that can print up to 10 million passports yearly, and has expanded other sites across the nation.
The shortfall is in trained adjudicators who can check citizenship and spot fraud. They must have college degrees and undergo security checks.
Several years ago, travelers could have a new passport in their mailbox in a few weeks.
Kennedy said the wait time crept up to 12 weeks, and is now at about 10 weeks for most applicants. He predicted it would be back down to six weeks by the end of September. |
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