State Department to Revoke Child Support Passports for 2,700 Parents
The U.S. State Department will begin revoking passports on Friday for parents who owe child support and have unpaid debt of at least $100,000. About 2,700 American passport holders are in the initial group, and those abroad will need to go to a U.S. embassy or consulate for an emergency travel document to return home.
Mora Namdar, the assistant secretary of state for consular affairs, said the department is widening a practice it says has helped push parents to pay child support debt. “We are expanding a commonsense practice that has been proven effective at getting those who owe child support to pay their debt,” she said.
Mora Namdar and the first revocations
The first revocations will target people whose unpaid child support reaches $100,000 or more. The figures for that initial group came from the Department of Health and Human Services, which supplied the State Department with the count of about 2,700 affected passport holders.
Namdar also said, “Once these parents resolve their debts, they can once again enjoy the privilege of a U.S. passport.”
1996 law and 1998 program
The broader expansion will reach parents who owe more than $2,500 in unpaid child support, a threshold set by a little-enforced 1996 law. Until this week, the penalty applied only to parents who applied to renew their passports, but under the new policy HHS will inform the State Department of all past-due payments above that level.
The department said in a statement after the expansion was reported on Feb. 10: “While we can’t confirm the causation in all of those cases, we are taking this action precisely to impel these parents to do the right thing by their children and by U.S. law.”
State collections since 1998
The State Department said the passport revocation program began in earnest in 1998, and states have since collected some $657 million in arrears through it. Over the past five years, states collected more than $156 million in more than 24,000 individual lump-sum payments.
That record gives the department a built-in test as the program widens: the first wave starts Friday, and the larger pool will follow soon after, once HHS finishes collecting data from state agencies tracking parents who owe more than $2,500. For parents who travel, the immediate issue is simple — a passport can now be pulled even if they are not renewing it.
