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For a week, she called, waited on hold, and each time was told the only available appointments in the entire country were in Hawaii. Knight began calling the National Passport Center’s appointment line every morning, where hold times can stretch past the 15-minute mark, in hopes of securing a same-day appointment at a U.S. The closest passport office that took walk-in appointments was two hours away, in Lampasas, Texas, and she made the drive there twice to get her family’s documents processed and sent off to the State Department.Ī month later, she realized she might not get the documents in time. She first reached out to a private passport expediter in her hometown, Austin, Texas, but after paying them more than $500 in hopes of getting the passports within a few days, she was surprised to be told that they expected the process to take five to seven weeks, and she’d have to deliver the paperwork to a passport office herself.īut all of the local passport offices require an appointment and were booked solid for months. And her son, who is 8 months old, didn’t have one at all. In May, Paula Knight, 33, was gearing up for a family trip to Mallorca when she realized she, her husband and her 11-year-old daughter would all need to renew their passports before traveling in early July. “We have taken several steps to reduce wait times during the pandemic, including instituting overtime for our employees, temporarily assigning additional staff to adjudicate passports, and hiring additional staff,” she wrote in the email. Rena Bitter, the assistant secretary for consular affairs at the State Department, said in an email that the infusion of cash was necessary because the department’s budget had been dealt a real blow by the pandemic.

It’s like for two years the dam was up and now the dam is broken.” “So many people are now applying for passports. I think this is bipartisan,” he said in a phone call. “There’s a lot of pressure from all parts.

He called on the State Department to end “passport purgatory” by increasing staffing and helped negotiate a budget increase of nearly $211 million for the Bureau of Consular Affairs for 2023 to help ease the crunch. Schumer has been vocal about the challenges facing passport applications. “It’s moved some, but there’s still a huge backlog,” said the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, whose office, he said, has been fielding a steady stream of requests from constituents for help pushing passport applications through bureaucratic red tape. This is an improvement from last year, when the State Department, struggling to make headway on a massive backlog of passport applications that piled up in early 2020, admitted processing times for passports had stretched to as long as 18 weeks. Rushed service, which costs an additional $60 and took anywhere from a few days to three weeks before Covid-19, is currently running between five and seven weeks. State Department, routine passport service, which once took as little as six weeks is now taking between eight and 11 weeks.

Wildes said.įor applicants who take the more traditional route and apply for renewal or a new passport directly through the U.S. “Their fees are through the ceiling,” Mr. And with fewer slots available, prices have gone up in tandem. Passport Agency now allows to be handled by a courier has been reduced. After coming back online last summer, the number of applications that each individual U.S. The services of courier companies, often called passport expediters, were temporary halted in March 2020 as part of a wider pandemic shutdown. Wildes, like many immigration attorneys, often relies on private courier companies to help process rushed passports. He says that although his office has seen the number of urgent requests for passport help dip slightly in recent months, he is still fielding several hundred a month. “It’s a disaster,” said Michael Wildes, the managing partner of the law firm Wildes & Weinberg, P.C., which specializes in immigration law. And even when an appointment can be found within the proper time frame, there’s no guarantee it’s in the same city or even the same state as the applicant, forcing those in need of travel documents to fly or drive several hours just to get their passport on time.