Why U.S. passports are getting cancelled ?

There’s some very disturbing news out there that U.S. citizens are saying their passports have been reported lost, stolen, or cancelled after they get overseas. And the main reason this is concerning to many people is actually for five reasons.

First, these passports are being reported lost or stolen without their knowledge.
Second, the National Passport Agency and U.S. government authorities don’t seem to know why this is happening.
Third, airlines have been saying that they’re not involved because it’s not their job to confirm the validity of passports.
And fourth, there’s no way to check if your passport is lost or stolen before you leave the country.

So once you get abroad, if you get deported, that can cost you a lot of money, time, and stress. Make sure you have travel insurance. So let’s break all of this down, look at what happened, and talk about what you can do to try to prevent this from happening to you.

What’s happened here is that there are a lot of videos on TikTok and social media of people sharing their individual stories about what happened when they found out their passports were cancelled or their Global Entry was revoked. In one case, a woman said she wasn’t even found in the system anymore.

One person said he flew halfway around the world only to find out that Interpol—the international police—had his passport flagged as lost or stolen. Another person landed in Rome only to find out that Italian officials flagged her passport upon arrival. And another TikToker reported that officials at JFK Airport in New York confiscated her passport after she returned from Spain.

The first person, Parker, actually flew out of Miami. He flew to Thailand with his girlfriend and said that immigration officials in Thailand flagged his passport and then deported him. The whole situation was very confusing. What he later found out, after he got back, was that his passport had been flagged as lost within a month after he applied for it. So technically, it was flagged as lost or stolen before he even received it.

The issue here is that the only way to report your passport lost or stolen is online or by mail. And you need several pieces of very personal information to do this: your name, date of birth, Social Security number, address, and your passport number, if known.

We actually have our passport numbers memorized. We’ve memorized our last three or four passport numbers. That’s really important if you travel a lot or even when you get a new passport—to try to remember it the same way you remember your address or phone number. That way, if anything like this happens, you know your passport number.

What was especially scary is that when Parker contacted agencies in the U.S. after he got back, they had no idea what he was talking about because they had never heard of a situation like this. He contacted the National Passport Information Center, and they did not have his passport flagged as lost or stolen. It was only Interpol that had this information. This is very strange and still an unresolved situation. It seems like he was able to get it fixed, but people still don’t really know why it happened.

In the case of Marcy, who found out her passport was flagged when she arrived in Rome, she was able to get back to the U.S., but she had to swear under oath that she never reported her passport stolen. She still had to pay another $165 to get a new passport. In the end, this was a huge headache, and she said that no passport should be able to be cancelled by someone else.

Another woman in the U.S. named Rose said her information was completely wiped from the passport database. We watched three different updates from her about her passport being lost and her Global Entry being revoked. This is still a developing story. She ended up going to multiple government offices, talking to her congressional representative, and eventually going in person to the National Passport Agency, where she was able to get a new passport. But this still doesn’t explain what caused the issue in the first place.

In another case, a TikToker said her passport was confiscated at JFK when she returned from Spain. She later found out that her document had been marked as lost years earlier—yet she had still used it for international travel and even to apply for Global Entry. This suggests a lack of communication between different departments and possibly very strange clerical errors.

The warning here is that getting deported is costly. Applying for an emergency passport is costly. And the entire situation is extremely stressful. So far, there is no general consensus on how or why these situations happened.

One of the most alarming things is that without a valid passport, you can’t leave the country. This is why many people believe it’s important to have more than one passport. A lot of people have a plan B or plan C and want to get citizenship in another country so this can’t happen to them.

For years, this idea seemed far-fetched. But now it appears to be happening to multiple people for different reasons at the same time. Having a second passport doesn’t mean you have to renounce your U.S. citizenship. It simply gives you a backup option if something happens to your primary passport.

If that’s not possible for you, you can contact the National Passport Agency. However, the problem is that in Parker’s case, the U.S. agency said there was no issue, while Interpol flagged it. You don’t want to be contacting international police agencies without a reason.

Many people who experienced this said they wish there were a way to check the status of your passport before traveling abroad, instead of finding out after you arrive. If you are already overseas and experiencing this issue, you can contact your local U.S. embassy or consulate through the Department of State.

If you’re worried about your Global Entry, you can also contact that program directly. Make sure emails from these agencies don’t go to your spam folder. In Rose’s case, she received an email about her status change at around 2:17 a.m. local time in California.

You can also reach out to your U.S. congressional representative if you’re concerned. In several cases, including Parker and Rose, going in person to the National Passport Agency helped resolve the situation.

One person also recommended carrying your birth certificate or a copy of it. She said she used it as proof of identity to get back into the country. We don’t usually travel with my birth certificate, but having multiple forms of ID—such as a national ID or driver’s license—is always a good idea.

When traveling abroad, make sure to keep your passport, ID, and credit cards separate. That way, if one bag is lost or stolen, you still have backup identification.