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This father missed his daughter’s wedding — thanks to passport delays

2023-07-18 00:00:00.0 华盛顿邮报-华盛顿特区原网页

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Larry Rouse had waited a long time for all of it.

The wedding — his baby girl, finally marrying her college sweetheart.

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The trip — the last big journey he’d made was 34 years ago.

The passport — 70 years old, and he’s never had one. His daughter’s dream wedding in Cancún, Mexico, would be Rouse’s first trip out of the country.

The break — retired from his job in the juvenile justice system, Rouse still does landscaping to pay the bills. He prepaid his hotel room at the resort and got a good price on his plane ticket. He couldn’t wait to sink his toes into the sand.

Instead, he sat at home in Glenarden, Md., on June 1. His chair in the front row at his daughter’s wedding faced the Caribbean Sea, empty.

Rouse was one of thousands of Americans who applied for a passport and didn’t get it in time, even though he did everything right. Thank bureaucracy. And the failure of every single person who heard his pleas for help to care.

The State Department told The Washington Post’s Andrea Sachs that it’s getting a surge of applications — about 400,000 a week in June. The passport agency is on track to process 2 million more passports than it did in 2017, which had been the previous record.

“This is creating a real crisis,” Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) said at a news conference outside the agency’s office in Washington on Friday.

Warner poked the State Department in March on this, when the delays began happening. That month, passport officials extended their wait times, warning travelers that routine service would take 10 to 13 weeks and an expedited application would take seven to nine weeks.

“In addition to costly delays, many constituents who filed to renew their passports online are receiving little to no information on the progress being made with applications regardless of how well in advance of planned travel their requests were filed, leaving many in limbo waiting for their documents,” Warner said in a March 30 letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Rouse went to the post office to submit his application three months before the wedding. He wasn’t taking any chances.

“I even paid to get it faster. They call it ‘expedited.’ It was $250,” he said, still steaming. “When I think about it, it just hurts.”

Passport delays are becoming a travel crisis

Even accounting for delays, his application should’ve made it through.

The average processing time right now — according to Passportwaitingtime.com, a site that crowdsources up-to-the-minute data — is estimated at 78.12 calendar days to get a passport. That’s 2？ months, well within the three months that Rouse gave the agency — the agency funded with his tax dollars — to get it right.

The rest of the wedding party who needed passports — the bride, the stepmother, the children — gambled that the regular processing time would work.

“I started getting worried when all of them got their passports, but I didn’t,” Rouse said. “I started calling on it, every day. I told them, ‘This is my daughter’s wedding.’ They took the details and said they would get back to me.”

No one did.

His daughter, Patrice Rouse, worried.

She had just moved into a management role at the lab where she had been an associate scientist, so she had a lot to juggle. Plus all the pesky wedding details — like, should she get pretty but painful wedding shoes or just go barefoot in the sand — were there. (She went barefoot.) And now her dad, her No. 1 fan, wasn’t sure he’d make it.

“He’s been there for everything, one of my biggest supporters,” said Rouse, 30. “Not just high school and college graduations, but I’m talking tennis matches, recitals. He was there for all of it, front and center. I couldn’t imagine getting married without him.”

So she started calling the State Department, looking for answers. She told the people on the other line that this was her wedding. A once-in-a-lifetime event. And her dad had done all the right things to get himself there.

“They had no appointments for him to come in and just talk to someone,” she said. “Oh, one appointment they had was in their office in Hawaii. People don’t have the money to do that.”

I’ve been there. When I was scrambling to get my son’s expired passport renewed before a trip to see family abroad, the State Department offered me an appointment in New Mexico, the day before our travel. There was just no way we could swing it. So like Rouse, I kept calling. I got lucky, an appointment in D.C. opened up just as I was on the line during my seventh call of the day.

Rouse didn’t.

He was still calling the State Department, dialing his Congress member’s office, pleading for anyone to intervene and see what the heck was happening with the application he mailed in March.

State Department spokespeople, who said that they can’t comment on an individual case and “continue seeing unprecedented demand for passports,” said Rouse can apply for a refund for his expedited fee of $60. That won’t even begin to cover what he lost.

In the land of bureaucracy and processes, where people in suits spar over appropriations and systems, this is the very human reminder of the gigantic importance that paperwork done conscientiously and properly can change a person’s life.

Even on the day of the wedding, Patrice Rouse kept his chair open, just in case a miracle happened.

“No one walked me down the aisle, she said. “If it couldn’t be my dad, I didn’t want to replace him with anybody.”

They lost money on his hotel room. The airline wouldn’t refund his money but gave him credit for another flight.

A week later, his passport arrived in the mail.

Over the weekend, the family traveled again. Down from New York and up from Alabama, the Rouses and their kin packed their bags and came to Maryland, where they reenacted the wedding reception with Larry Rouse there.

He wore a straw hat and white linen. His daughter wore a white, one-shoulder dress; his son-in-law, a black bow tie. They grilled out and enjoyed one another.

“It was nice,” he said. “But I still wish I was there for the real thing.”

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