New ID rules overwhelm US passport office

New ID rules overwhelm US passport office
By Daniel Dombey in London
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: August 15 2007 22:08 | Last updated: August 15 2007 22:08


US consular staff in London, Mexico City and New Delhi have stepped in to help with a crisis in issuing US passports that some members of Congress have compared to the response to Hurricane Katrina.

People with knowledge of the situation said some of the biggest consulates overseas have been assisting in renewing passports for US residents, although not with issuing first-time passports. The London embassy alone is thought to have processed 12,000 passports for US resident citizens. Such work is normally done at centres within the US.

US officials declined to comment on the use of diplomatic resources overseas to deal with a backlog in issuing millions of passports. The delays have seen hundreds of Americans cancel trips abroad because of the failure to process their passport requests on time.

The White House has announced that it has interrupted all “non-critical” state department training within the US, instead using staff to process passports.

In June, almost 3m people were awaiting passports – a figure the state department aims to reduce to 1m-1.5m by the end of the year. At present, it takes 10-12 weeks to issue a passport, compared with four to six weeks normally.

The state department has admitted it was unprepared for a surge in demand for passports sparked by new regulations requiring US citizens returning by air from Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and Bermuda to carry passports. Documents such as driver’s licences or birth certificates had previously been deemed sufficient by border officials, as was a verbal declaration of US ­citizenship.

The US is due, next summer, to also demand formal travel documents from travellers arriving from those countries by land and sea.

“It seems that the administration that brought us the response to Hurricane Katrina has now ruined our summer vacation,” said Gary Ackerman, a Democrat from New York, at a hearing last month.

The state department points to higher-than-expected demand. In the first three months of this year, 5.5m people requested passports, a figure that compares with the 12m requests in the whole of 2006 and 10m in 2005. The estimated total for this year is 17m.

“We are looking at approximately 23m applicants in 2008 and as high as 30m by 2010,” said Maura Harty, assistant secretary of state for consular affairs, in testimony before a Senate committee in June. “For many, the passport is becoming something like some form of national ID card.”

Ms Harty links this shift to the publicity campaign that alerted US citizens to the new regulations – themselves passed by Congress in response to the findings of the 9/11 Commission which concluded that: “For terrorists, travel documents are as important as weapons.”

“Before the passage of this law, somebody like me could take a trip to the Caribbean and on the strength of my Staten Island accent and my Gold’s Gym card talk my way back into America,” Ms Harty said. “And you [Congress] rightly realised that wasn’t the way to do business any more.”

But Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican member of the House of Representatives from Florida, said the growth of demand for passports was not a sufficient defence.

“It’s outrageous, incomprehensible, unconscionable,” she said. “How can we not have foreseen this problem?”