On June 21, my stepdaughter tried to board a flight from Germany back to the USA. Her US passport was refused, and she was not allowed to board. Now, three weeks later, here is the message I received from her, still in Germany, about her status:
“Ticket agents told me american authorities have attached a travel restriction to my passport. The Embassy says they know nothing about it and to deal with DHS, which I am trying to do.”
I checked the Do Not Fly list, and her name is not on it. Has anybody any knowledge or information about anything like this?
How old is she? Has she been in any legal trouble?
Note a friend of mine went into a Social Security office with a pocket knife in his pants. The guard asked if he was carrying any bombs, knifes, hand grenades, nuclear weapons, etc. He said yes, he had a pocket knife…
Well they took his ID and placed him on the terrorist list!
So it could be something as simple as that. (Probably not simple to do something about though.)
This is the way to go. A Congress critter can make an inquiry to the embassy in Germany, who will then have 24 hours to get off their asses and make an official local inquiry and response.
If she were really on the No Fly List she wouldn’t even be able to get a boarding pass. If there’s a restriction on the passport then that’s a matter for the State Department, not DHS. I agree with the suggestion to contact your Senator or Representative.
Thank you for the link to the ACLU, which is exactly the information I was looking for.
In this particular case, she is a US-born resident of Germany, intending a leisure trip to the US and return to Germany, so there is no urgency involved.
This purports to be a “No-Fly List” . It has 100,000 names on it.
Obviously, it is not genuine but the names must have come from somewhre, so it might be the closest thing available to the actual secret list. I assumed some overlap.
Thirded. Their offices have staffers whose job is to do nothing but handle such issues for constituents, and the good ones can cut through miraculous amounts of red tape.
Stupid question, but what sort of travel restriction could this possibly be? Does it apply to any travel with that passport or just flying into the USA? Has the passport been invalidated?
Can she fly to Canada (Montreal, Toronto) and take the bus from there? Once she’s at the border, I cannot imagine they can refuse her entry unless they claim her passport is invalid (which would mean she cannot fly to Canada either).
Is there any chance that she has a problem with the law that has gotten worse since the time her passport was issued? Has she been indicted for a crime, or an arrest warrant issued? Does she have a child support debt that has grown larger in recent years?
I’m not casting aspersions. These are reasons why a passport can be denied, and I think that in theory, they could also be the basis for applying a restriction to an already-issued passport. (I don’t suspect that happens very often in practice, but I’m just trying to lay out all of the possibilities).
Disclaimer: This is not legal advice. This is just anonymous noodling on the internet. No lawyer-client relationship exists here.
How does she just suck it up and spend three more weeks (and counting) in Germany? How is she paying for it? Where is she staying? Is she just sitting on her thumbs all day? I’d be banging on the doors of the embassy every day as soon as they opened. It shouldn’t take that long to fix the problem. She could have come back on a tramp steamer by now!
Maybe she just doesn’t want to come back?
PS there’s no way you can check the no-fly list. That’s the problem with it. That was the argument about linking gun purchase rights with the no-fly list. It is impossible to check the list now, without buying a ticket and getting on a plane (or not getting on a plane, as the case may be). But if no-fliers try to buy a gun, and are refused, that’s an easy way to check if you’re on The List.
Occasionally on one of my professional listserves, I read about passports being revoked (or refusal to issue or renew passports) in circumstances when the State Dept. suspects the person isn’t actually a U.S. citizen and/or when previous passports had been issued erroneously. Things like kids born at home and delivered by midwives in South Texas (there have been issues with fraud, as in the kid was perhaps not actually born in the U.S.), kids who didn’t actually derive citizenship from a U.S. citizen parent and the mistake is discovered belatedly, all kinds of crazy things. I even had a case where the State Department mistakenly issued a passport to an adopted child who, under the law in effect at the time of her adoption, wasn’t a U.S. citizen…and didn’t discover the mistake until many years later, when she tried to renew the erroneously issued passport.
Eva Luna, Immigration Paralegal
P.S. Really, your elected representatives can be a great help in straightening out things like this.
I’m very sorry this is happening to your daughter, but… how does one “check the Do Not Fly List”? Are you sure you actually have access to the full list?