3/25/2023 0 Comments Rush my passport![]() And I was like: ‘How are other people getting appointments?’” ![]() I felt like I was going through the motions correctly, and contacting the appropriate people. “I tried to stay even-keeled about it because the Covid-19 crisis has really given me an opportunity to realize there are a lot of people worse off than me,” Mr. He made it to the Chicago passport agency on time, and got his passport that same day. On June 4, three days before his scheduled trip, he took a day off from work, spent $400 on airfare from Atlanta and another $120 on Uber rides. Williams joined a Facebook group for Americans struggling with visa and passport issues, where a group member offered him an appointment in Chicago that she no longer needed. He was told there were 50 passport inquiries ahead of his.Īs a last resort, Mr. He also called the office of his congressman, the Republican Representative Buddy Carter, every day on his lunch break, asking if the official could help. “I was told they released new appointments at midnight, so every night at 11:55 p.m., I would be on standby, refreshing my browser,” Mr. ![]() After five weeks, with his passport still processing and his trip departure looming, he began hunting online for an appointment at one of the State Department’s 26 official passport centers and passport agencies, where he could renew in person and get the document in one day. He mailed it in for renewal and paid for expedited processing, which before the pandemic would have taken up to three weeks. Williams was looking forward to a trip to the Dominican Republic with his girlfriend in early June, he realized that his passport was about to expire. The crunch is forcing many Americans who need travel documents urgently to travel significant distances - sometimes even across the country - for an in-person appointment that will get their documents processed on time.īen Williams, an office manager at an Atlanta law firm, is one of them. But despite the State Department making headway on a massive backlog of passport applications that piled up in the early months of the pandemic, appointments at passport agencies across the country remain elusive, and processing time for renewals by mail is lagging by 10 weeks or more. Others are only now seeing that their documents are set to expire soon. Passport Acceptance Agency.ĭuring the most extensive travel shutdown in modern history, hundreds of thousands of Americans let their passports expire. As Americans finally start taking their long-awaited vacations, a surprising number of them are realizing that before they can go abroad, they must first take a different kind of trip: to a U.S.
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