More than 100,000 US citizens — almost ten times as many as the State Department had projected — have been required to complete one or both of two impossible “long form” supplements to their applications for US passports, according to records we received this month in response to a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request we filed in 2011.

[Numbers of passport applicants sent each of the two version of the long form passport application each year since 2014, as reported to us this month by the State Department in response to our 2011 FOIA request.]

Back in 2011, the State Department proposed an outrageous long form to be sent to some subset of applicants for US passports. The form includes a bizarre list of questions which most applicants would be unable to answer.

Do you know, or do you have any way to find out, the dates, addresses, and names of doctors for each of your mother’s pre-natal medical appointments, or the names, addresses, and phone numbers of everyone who was in the room when you were born?

Sending someone the supplemental long form is a pretext for denying their application for a passport. As we said in our comments to the State Department:

The proposed form reminds us unpleasantly of the invidious historic “Jim Crow” use of a literacy or civics test of arbitrary difficulty, required as a condition of registering to vote and administered in a standardless manner. By making the test impossible to pass, voter registrars could use it as an arbitrary and discriminatory – but facially neutral – excuse to prevent any applicant to whom they chose to give a sufficiently difficult test from registering to vote, on the ostensible basis of their having “failed” the test.

In a similar way, choosing to require an applicant for a passport to complete the proposed Form DS-5513, which few if any applicants could complete, would amount to a de facto decision to deny that applicant a passport. And that decision would be standardless, arbitrary, and illegal.

After we publicized this proposal, thousands of people submitted comments to the State Department calling for the proposed form to be withdrawn.

Although the State Department had falsely claimed in its application for approval that this was a “new” form, commenters reported that they had already (illegally) been required to fill out a version of this form, even though it had not been approved.

As soon as we learned this, we filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in April 2011 to find out how long the long form had been in use illegally without approval, how many people had been told to fill out the long form, and what if any criteria had been established for when to require a passport applicant to fill out the long form.

In practice, it appears that the long form was most often sent to Latinx US citizens whose home births were attended and reported by midwives. The implication is that the State Department wrongly assumes that midwives’ official reports of home births in Latinx communities are presumptively suspect and unreliable. But we still don’t know if there are any policies purporting to govern which passports applicants are sent the long form.

Eventually the State Department admitted that it was already using these forms without approval. Despite this, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) approved two versions of the”long form” passport application for use starting in 2013.

Meanwhile, the State Department delayed responding to our FOIA request… for thirteen years.

In 2016 the State Department threatened to close our FOIA request illegally without a response. When we complained, the head of the FOIA office apologized, but still didn’t respond to our request. Sometime after that the FOIA Office actually did close our request “inadvertently” without telling us, re-opening it again in 2021 or 2022. Earlier this year the FOIA Office again threatened to close our request illegally, still without a response.

We finally received an initial response to our FOIA request this month, but it included no information about the use of the unapproved long form for passport applicants before 2014. All of the recrords that existed when we filed our request in 2011 were either illegally destroyed while the request was pending, or withheld from disclosure.

Destroying records responsive to a FOIA request, while that request is pending, is a violation of the Federal Records Act (FRA) as well as of the FOIA statute. We have appealed the improper and incomplete response to our FOIA request and have reported the destruction of records for investigation as a likely violation of the FRA.

Aside from the forms themselves– which we already had — the only information the State Department released is a count of how many applicants for US passports have been sent letters requiring them to complete one of the two supplemental long forms in each of the ten fiscal years since 2014.

In its application to OMB for approval of these forms, the State Department said that 900 people were requested to complete the unapproved predecessor form in 2011, and estimated that 1145 passport applicants would have to fill out one of the two new forms each year. The State Department tried to minimize objections to the long forms by emphasizing how few people would be required to fill  them out.

But the reality has, we now know, been very different than the State Depaertment predicted.

In the first year the new forms were in use, 14,018 passport applicants were told to fill out one or the other of the long forms. The numbers have been lower since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, which drastically reduced the numbers of passport applications, but over the last ten years, an average of 10,819 people have been told to fill out one of these long forms each year — almost ten times as many as the State Department had estimated.

Almost nobody is able to complete these forms, and demanding that an applicant complete one of these forms is tantamount to summary denial of a passport. That means that more than a hundred thousand US citizens have been denied US passports over the last ten years, and an additonal number that may never be known (since the records have been destroyed) before that, through the use of these forms as a pretect for passport denials.

We regularly receive requests for assistance from US citizens who have been denied passports because they are unable to complete these deliberately impossible forms.

We urge Congress to explicitly prohibit the continued use of these forms. We encourage US citizens who are denied their right to a US passport, or who are denied their right to travel (including their right to leave and to return to the US) because the State Department won’t give them a passort, to complain to Congress and sue the State Department.

We will continue to seek the records about the use of these forms that have been improperly withheld, and to seek enforcement of the Federal Records Act against those State Department officials responsible for destroying the records we requested rather than releasing them in response to our FOIA requests.