Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing US Passport revocation which can occur in conjunction with being deficient in child support payments. I thought of making this video, and I'll go ahead and throw this up on screen, I thought of making this video after reading a recent comment on our channel; we'll go ahead and throw this up. Quoting directly: "Hi Ben, a little off-topic but I'm commenting here so that perhaps you can address this in a future video. I am American living in Thailand, and I saw in the news today that the United States will start revoking passports for US citizens who are in arrears on child support payments (a quick Google search can provide you with more details). To be 100% clear so no one misinterprets - I do not have children, so this does not personally affect me ... BUT I'm a little concerned about the precedent of revoking passports thereby leaving a person essentially stateless" Well it doesn't leave you stateless and I'll get to that in a minute; it leaves you without your passport. Quoting further: "with no home country if abroad when their passport is revoked ... Also, the concerning potential that passports could get revoked if a creditor back home says you owe them money that is in dispute, or myriad other murky situations... Seems to me like an incredibly slippery slope, and revoking one's passport seems draconian ... Thoughts?" 

Okay, so first of all, I've done videos on this before. This has been in existence for at least a decade. I remember doing cases like this going back about 12, 10, 12, 11 years where I would get calls a lot. It seems like it's happened a lot less - I don't know if people are more aware of it or what - but we would get calls from somebody who for example went in to get a certified copy of a passport or they went in to sometimes, and this is going back in the days of the Income Affidavit on Retirement Visas, they would go in to get an Income Affidavit, their passport would be copied as part of that process, and it would come up that they owed child support. If you owe, at the time, and I don't know if these thresholds have been raised, but at the time, if you owed more than $5,000 in child support in any one of the 50 states, and the District Attorney in that state then handed that - and now it's almost like an automatic mechanism - now the Courts and the District Attorney, if they then notified the US State Department of that deficiency, the State Department will revoke your passport; that's just how it works. 

Now here's another side to this. This not only, and this person’s sort of concern, but I don't think that they are aware that this has been around for a while. I was dealing with this a dozen years, 10 years ago, and somewhat in the interim, but I haven't seen so many of those cases especially since COVID. But long story short, this has been around a long time. Deficiency in child support could lead to a revocation of a passport. Now what does that mean? It does not render you stateless; it just renders you without your passport travel document. What's the upshot of that? Well the upshot of that is basically in Thailand, you're kind of up a creek because you don't have your passport, so therefore you're going to have problems just being here as a foreigner. But you can get a travel letter which will allow you to go back to the United States in order to rectify the arrears. Once the arrears are rectified, you get your passport reissued. Now that's been around for some time. What is actually new and this occurred on Nancy Pelosi's watch some years back - and I did videos, I did blogs for sure - but I've done video on this, if you were in arrears to the United States IRS by $50,000 or more, they will revoke your passport as well. They will notify the Department of State, the State Department will take that under advisement, and then they will revoke the passport and the only thing you can be issued is a travel letter to go back to the United States to go ahead and rectify the issue. 

So this is not something particularly new. It's kind of one of those things from NBC back in the old days, if you haven't seen it, it's new to you. Well this may be new to some people, but this has been around for a while. It's not something to take lightly. If you have child support payments back in the United States and you fail to keep them and make those payments, it could result in you not getting your passport renewed. Now with digital ID chips in these passports, it's also possible that you could see revocation occur at a port of entry in a foreign country, you could find yourself detained and then not able to enter that country and the only recourse is to take a travel letter and go back to the United States to fix this stuff. 

So if you find yourself in one of these situations - either with the IRS or with child support deficiency - it may not be a terrible idea to contact a legal professional, gain some insight and guidance into how best to proceed.