Yona Shemesh, 24, was born in Los Angeles, but he moved to Israel with his family at age 9. In July 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic was raging, he booked a ticket to Los Angeles to visit his grandparents in June 2021, knowing that he would have nearly an entire year to renew his American passport, which had long since expired.
Michael Wildes, the managing partner of the law firm Wildes & Weinberg, PC, which specializes in immigration law, estimates that the number of stranded Americans abroad is in the hundreds of thousands. And as of early April, 75% of U.S. consulates abroad remained at least partially closed. The State Department will not release numbers on how many Americans are awaiting passport appointments around the world, but the size of the backlog for interviews for approved U.S. immigration visas — which are also handled by the State Department and have been affected by the same slowdown — gives a sense of the challenge.
The State Department prohibits such practices, but the issue of bootleggers selling access to U.S. embassies is widespread enough that on Jan. 14, the Bureau of Consular Affairs issued a notice to registered passport courier companies warning them of consequences for pay-to-play offerings for appointments. David Alwadish, the founder of ItsEasy Passport & Visa, a passport-and-visa-expediting service, said that many of them are so small that they’re nearly impossible to track.