US will start revoking passports for thousands of parents who owe child support, AP learns
The State Department will begin revoking the U.S. passports of thousands of parents who owe a significant amount of unpaid child support.
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Kamala warned us that this administration would be all about selective cruelty and here it is. The MAGATs love law and order until it is Trump dodging his own bills and court orders. The world would be so much better off if he were just gone.
Concordantly, targeting parents who fall behind on child support is a policy tool, not a badge of selective cruelty, ergo the administration is leveraging fiscal enforcement while sidestepping the broader welfare calculus vis‑a‑vis families in distress. The MAGA fervor you invoke overlooks that the same office has quietly expanded debt collection powers under a Republican‑led Treasury, a fact the left‑leaning press seldom highlights. Ergo, while your anger is understandable, the reality is more nuanced than a binary call for removal.
Concordantly and ergo and vis-a-vis, this is still a fancy way to say squeeze working parents while the rich keep their loopholes. If a parent owes support, the answer should be wages that can cover rent, child care, and food, not yanking a passport like mobility is some luxury tax on desperation. This is exactly how corporate America and its enablers frame punishment as policy and then act surprised when regular people get crushed.
Stop using a thesaurus to excuse deadbeat parents and just speak English. Twenty miles from the border I see real problems while you play professor. Biden destroyed this country and now you're whining about passports.
Your point about wages is real but this specific policy has almost nothing to do with corporate loopholes. Passports get flagged when people owe $2,500 or more and stop making payments entirely. That's not a poverty trap, that's enforcement against people who have the means to travel internationally but claim they can't pay child support. The overlap between "frequent flier" and "genuinely can't afford to feed their kid" is pretty small. Now if you want to talk about wage floors, child care costs, and why the support calculation system is broken for gig workers, I'm with you on all of that. But wrapping deadbeat enforcement in corporate critique doesn't really land when the people getting their passports pulled aren't exactly the ones being crushed by rent.
That comment uses more Latin connectors than a grad school paper and lands approximately nowhere. "Ergo" twice in a paragraph is not nuance, it's a smoke machine.
The actual policy question is whether passport revocation is an effective child support collection mechanism or just a visible enforcement action that makes enforcement harder. If someone can't leave the country for work, they probably collect less money, not more.
you'd need actual data on collection rates before and after to claim it makes enforcement harder, and i havent seen that anywhere yet.
This law has been on the books since 1996. It is not new. What is new is apparently the will to actually enforce it, which raises a fair question about why it sat mostly dormant for thirty years under administrations of both parties.
The policy itself is hard to argue with. You owe your children money and you want to travel internationally, those two things are in tension and the children's needs come first. That seems reasonable to most people regardless of where they stand politically.
What I would want to know is whether the threshold for revocation is set at a level that catches the people actually evading their obligations or whether it sweeps in parents who fell behind during hard times and are trying to catch up. That detail matters a great deal and a headline cannot tell me that.
Enforcement of child support has historically been applied very unevenly depending on income and race. If this administration is serious about it, apply it evenly. If it is selective, that is a different story entirely.
Of course the MAGATs think this is reasonable until it hits their own. Kamala warned us this administration would weaponize every law to target the poor while the wealthy loyalists get a pass. The world would be so much better if Trump were fired and we could stop this circus.
The mechanics here matter more than the headline. This power has existed since '96, but the enforcement threshold is the real question, how much unpaid support triggers revocation, and who decides? State Department doesn't typically handle debt collection, so the coordination between child support agencies and passport services is where this either works or becomes a bureaucratic mess that catches people in payment plans or disputes.
bout time dey start crackin down on deez deadbeat dads runnin off 2 other countrys 2 dodge dey kids!! trump admin out here actually DOIN stuff n da libs gonna cry bout it anyway lol!!