State Department to Revoke Child Support Passports for 2,700 News Today
news today: The State Department will begin proactively revoking passports from parents who owe unpaid child support, starting Friday with those owing $100,000 or more. About 2,700 passport holders fall into that first group, and the wider program can reach Americans with more than $2,500 in arrears under a law that has existed since 1996.
State Department and the 1996 law
The change is in enforcement, not statute. A provision in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 already gave the federal government authority to revoke the U.S. passport of any American who owed more than $2,500 in unpaid child support, but for most of its life the law was used only when people applied to renew a passport or sought another consular service.
On Thursday, May 7, the State Department told the it will begin acting before those voluntary applications arrive. That shift matters because the first revocations begin Friday, and the first group is narrow: parents who owe at least $100,000.
What the numbers show
The first wave is small compared with the scale of the problem. Nationally, child support arrears have climbed to more than $113 billion, across over 15 million active child support cases involving some amount of past-due payment. Less than half of non-custodial parents are in full compliance with their court-ordered obligations.
Custodial parents often sit at the other end of that gap. About 30 percent of custodial parents who are legally owed support receive nothing, and the average child support order is around $460 a month. About 80 percent of custodial parents in the United States are women, which means the arrears problem falls heavily on households already doing the day-to-day work of raising children.
Friday’s first revocations
The immediate target is the 2,700 passport holders in the $100,000-or-more category. Parents in that group will be the first to lose travel documents, while the lower $2,500 threshold written into the 1996 law remains the broader standard the program will eventually use.
For affected parents, the practical question is not whether the law exists — it does — but when enforcement reaches their case. Friday is the first date tied to actual revocations, and the State Department’s move turns a dormant authority into an active tool against parents with the largest unpaid balances.
