Immigration fears fuel rush for passports
Unprecedented demand at Austin office expected to continue growing.
Carlos Culajay and his wife, immigrants from Guatemala and Mexico, respectively, waited for hours in Travis County’s passport office Thursday, bouncing daughters Emily, 2, and Natalie, 14 months, on their knees.
It was time to get U.S. passports for their little girls “because of fear of the president,” Culajay said in Spanish. As immigration enforcement actions increasingly target people with no criminal histories, Culajay and his wife, who are undocumented, worry about having to leave the country and their U.S. citizen daughters being unable to return.
Culajay was among swarms of Austinites who have turned out to get passports in recent weeks, many driven by fears associated with President Donald Trump’s rhetoric and recent Austin-area deportations. Some are green card holders or undocumented immigrants getting passports for their U.S.-born children. Others are Hispanic U.S. citizens fearful that they could be stopped and made to prove their citizenship.
This time of year is typically the passport office’s busiest — after the start of the new year and before spring break — said Nancy Tripp, Travis County’s passport program manager. But there’s never been demand like now.
The office’s waiting room on North Airport Boulevard can hold about 100 people at a time. Lately, it’s been overfilled to the point that people have
had to wait in a line outside the building. Officials have been turning away anyone who shows up after about 1:30 p.m. so they can get through the whole line by 4:30 p.m.
“This is the first year we’ve had to have them literally wait outside and have deputies keep them there,” Tripp said, noting the officers posted to prevent an overflow of people from cramming into the building.
On Friday, the line began to form at 5 a.m., three hours before the office opened.
The office processes about 80 passports a day during slower months and maxes out at about 200 per day during busy months.
But now they’re hitting 200 even after shutting the doors halfway through the day.
Travis County District Clerk Velva Price said she couldn’t say for sure what was causing the rush, but noted that the timing seemed to correlate with media coverage of Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions.
“I haven’t had a chance to talk with anyone coming, but it seems that after the information came out about ICE that the numbers did increase,” she said. “That’s all I know to connect it to.”
Overall demand for passports is also up, both locally and nationally. The U.S. State Department attributed that increase to a spike in renewals by passport holders 10 years after the U.S. began requiring the document for travel to Western Hemisphere locations such as Canada, Mexico and South America. Current processing time is about six weeks.
Demand is only expected to increase in the weeks leading up to spring break, Price said. Her office is looking at how to speed the line, starting with getting a translation service involved. Most of the people in the waiting room Thursday spoke Spanish, while just a few of the county’s passport agents do so.
Families waiting at around 3 p.m. said they had been there since 10 a.m. Earlier in the day, some applicants had shared pizzas and drinks with one another as people from various countries mingled, they said.
Maria del Carmen and Eladio Diaz moved to Austin from Mexico in 2009 and became U.S. citizens in 2012. Now, they said, they’re afraid of not having identification on them that proves their citizenship. Byron Oliva, a green card holder from Guatemala who has lived in Austin 12 years, was waiting to get a passport for his 3-yearold son, Dylan.
“We don’t know what will happen,” Oliva said in Spanish.
Even people with no reason to fear immigration confusion admitted some anxieties. Amanda Chaviano, a fifth-generation native Central Texan, said her friends had been speculating that just getting a passport could become more difficult.
“It’s just in case,” she said.