Passport delays leave Kansas City travelers in limbo, jeopardizing summer trip plans

When Elsie Chen tried to renew her U.S. passport this spring, she thought seven weeks would be enough time for her application to make its way through the State Department bureaucracy before a much-anticipated trip to Taiwan in June to meet her boyfriend’s family.

She guessed wrong. As Chen’s flight approached with no word on her passport, the 25-year-old Kansas City nurse began spending days dialing an overloaded official hotline before learning that she had to dial right when the line opened at 8 a.m. to have any chance of speaking with someone.

Chen looked into getting an appointment at a passport office, but the closest offices are located hours away in Chicago and Hot Springs, Arkansas. Without a car and with just days before her flight, she weighed the cost of traveling to Chicago.

“I was thinking what if I Uber and pay like $300 just to go there,” Chen said. Even if she got on the road, there was no guarantee she could secure a coveted appointment.

Across the Kansas City metro, countless residents are having harrowing experiences trying to obtain a new passport or renew an existing one, part of a nationwide flood of frustration with the State Department. Passport requests are at unprecedented levels, officials say, lengthening processing times and cutting passport arrivals too close for comfort for many travelers.

The exasperation of travelers is compounded in Kansas City and much of the Midwest by the lack of passport offices, also called passport agencies, which offer in-person appointments to resolve last-minute application problems. Beyond Chicago and Hot Springs, the next closest offices to Kansas City are in Denver, Dallas and Minneapolis.

But the offices, which don’t accept walk-ins, are often booked solid. When appointments are available, the time slot might be for only one or two days in the future, forcing applicants to purchase expensive last-minute flights or embark on day-long road trips.

“I don’t know that the Department of State anticipated the overwhelming rush of passports. It seems that’s what the issue is,” said David J. Alwadish, president and CEO of ItsEasy, a New York-based passport expediting service that has customers nationwide.

In this atmosphere of desperation, members of Congress are increasingly becoming a solution of last resort for travelers whose passports remain in limbo as trips approach. Requests to help unclog paperwork logjams are pouring into congressional offices, where caseworkers attempt to resolve problems for constituents who are set to travel within days.

Chen was able to secure a passport after contacting the office of Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Kansas City Democrat. Chen said that when she applied for her passport, she had sent in an expired passport from her childhood but that it hadn’t been accepted as valid identification, resulting in a holdup that Cleaver’s office was able to resolve.

When Chen spoke with The Star on June 1, she had just received her passport that morning. She had originally been scheduled to take a train that morning to St. Louis and then leave for Taiwan. But the passport problems had delayed her departure until the weekend.

“Apply way, way, way in advance – maybe even a year in advance,” Chen said.

Kate Calvert, a first grade teacher in Kansas City, said she applied for passports for her two children, 4 and 7, in March. She thought that would be far enough in advance ahead of a June vacation to Mexico.

But when she checked the status of their applications on the State Department website, only one child showed up, prompting her to seek Cleaver’s help. She’s now received passports for both children.

“You worry, because it’s already paid,” Calvert said. “Mexico doesn’t care that your passport doesn’t come through, they still have your money.”

Passport wait times ‘unacceptable’

Cleaver and Rep. Sharice Davids, a Democrat representing much of the Kansas side of the metro, last week sent a joint letter to the State Department demanding more information about the causes of the delays and when processing times will improve.

“We understand that high demand has put enormous pressure on the agency’s ability to process applications more efficiently. But with demand remaining high, actions must be taken to improve wait times and solve processing issues,” Cleaver and Davids wrote.

Their letter echoes messages from other members of Congress in recent months voicing frustration with the current state of the passport process. Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican who took office in January, in an April letter called current wait times “unacceptable and untenable.”

The Biden administration has cast the long processing times as the product of surging applications after the pandemic sent the volume of inquiries plummeting. Secretary of State Antony Blinken testified during a House budget hearing in March that the agency was receiving more than 500,000 applications a week – about 30 to 40% above last year’s volumes.

As COVID-19 international travel restrictions have lifted, international travel is approaching pre-pandemic levels. Globally, international tourist arrivals in the first quarter of 2023 were at 80% of pre-pandemic levels, according to the World Tourism Organization, an agency of the United Nations. The number of international tourists in the first quarter was more than double the same period a year ago.

Blinken said the State Department was hiring more employees to increase capacity and had authorized overtime.

“We’ve had to build back and we’ve been in an intense effort to do that,” Blinken said.

The State Department has also created an online portal for passport renewals, but paused online renewals in early March. Blinken has said the portal was closed for fine-tuning before eventually being brought online again.

The State Department said in response to questions that it has increased the number of lines and people available at the National Passport Information Center – which handles questions from applicants such as Chen and Calvert – and will continue to grow capacity to handle the influx of calls. The center has also started offering weekend service and staff are working “tens of thousands of hours of overtime” and that staff from elsewhere in the State Department have been assigned to help with passports.

Applicants don’t need an appointment at a passport agency “if they plan ahead,” a State Department spokesperson said.

But for applicants who are leaving in just a few days, an appointment can mean the difference between being grounded or leaving on time. And the flight or long drive needed to get to a passport office means Kansas City residents could be at a disadvantage when it comes to accessing last-minute assistance from the State Department.

Davids and Cleaver in their letter say that nationwide delays are especially challenging for the Kansas City region because of the long distance to a passport office.

“When a constituent is unable to renew a passport through traditional means and needs it urgently issued, sometimes their only option is traveling to a passport agency,” Davids and Cleaver wrote. “Yet, even for the few individuals who are able to make this journey, these agencies can have limited appointment availability.”

Calls for KC passport office

The National Defense Authorization Act, which Congress passed in December, requires the State Department to review the geographic diversity of passport offices. Most of the offices are located in the northeast or southern United States, but Utah Republican Sens. Mitt Romney and Mike Lee have pushed for an office in Salt Lake City.

Davids and Cleaver’s letter asks for the status of the nationwide review and says an office in Kansas City would be “enormously beneficial” to their constituents. The State Department told The Star it does not generally discuss congressional correspondence, but said it is “constantly reassessing our operations to maximize efficiencies and are introducing innovations to our customer service and processing models.”

Davids told reporters on Friday that she has “no idea” why Kansas City doesn’t have a passport office. But she made the case that the region’s economic importance – with an international airport and as an intermodal hub – means an office should be considered.

“Even if that was all we were looking at, it seems like it would be useful for us to have a passport office here in the Kansas City metro area,” Davids said.

Alwadish said he believes the passport offices are located based on expected demand. Some of the locations make inherent sense – Chicago, New York City, Miami, Los Angeles – because they are dense, urban centers with international airports.

On the other hand, St. Albans, Vermont, population roughly 6,900, has an office but is close to the Canadian border.

“It’s not easy. It’s a national security document and I could have all the criticisms I want but at the end of the day, the Department of State takes this document very seriously,” Alwadish said. “And you just can’t open up offices … we can’t open up an office just like you and I might open up a store.”

The Star’s Daniel Desrochers contributed reporting