The U.S. State Department says it will begin revoking the passports of Americans with significant amounts of court-ordered child support debt.
The government agency told The Associated Press on Thursday that the revocations would begin Friday and be focused on those who owe $100,000 or more.
That would apply to about 2,700 American passport holders, according to figures supplied to the State Department by the Department of Health and Human Services.
In a statement from the department on Thursday, it said the policy “supports the welfare of American children by exacting real consequences for child support delinquency under existing federal law.”
“Any American with significant child support debt should arrange payment to the relevant state or states now to prevent passport revocation,” the statement continued.
The revocation program also plans to penalize parents who owe more than US$2,500 in unpaid child support, the State Department said. The threshold set by a little-enforced 1996 law under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act was $5,000.
“Promotion of responsible fatherhood and motherhood is integral to successful child rearing and the well-being of children,” the law states.
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It was unclear on Thursday how many passport holders owe more than $2,500 because the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is still collecting data from state agencies that track these figures, officials told the AP.
The announcement marks a shift in how passport policy operates in the U.S.
Until this week, only those who applied to renew their passports with outstanding child support debt were subject to the penalty. Under the new policy, HHS will inform the State Department of all overdue payments of more than $2,500 and parents in that group with passports will have their documents revoked, the department said.
Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Mora Namdar told the AP the realignment of the law would expand “a commonsense practice that has been proven effective at getting those who owe child support to pay their debt.”
“Once these parents resolve their debts, they can once again enjoy the privilege of a U.S. passport,” she said.
The expansion of the program was first reported by the Associated Press in February. Since then, the State Department said it had seen a wave of debt-reconciliation filings from parents who would otherwise be subject to passport revocation.
“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,” the department told the U.S. news agency.
Even before the policy was expanded, the department said the program had been a “powerful tool” to get parents to pay what they owed. It said that since it began in earnest in 1998, states had collected some $657 million in arrears, including more than $156 million in over 24,000 individual lump-sum payments over the past five years.
–with files from the Associated Press
Everyone knows Trump did this just for Hunter Biden, who has been dodging child support for years and had to leave the USA because he accumulated millions in debt.
It turns out that his “art” lost popularity in 2024, and none of the other energy companies want to put him on the board of directors, for some reason.
If you can’t afford your child support, then you can’t afford to go on vacation. The threshold should be much lower than $100K.
Good idea Canada should do the same