Need a passport? Don’t look to Tarrant County

Tarrant County remains out of the passport business — for now — and officials don’t know when or if that will change.

County officials received a letter from the State Department about three weeks ago telling them to immediately stop processing passport applications.

“Right now, we are in a holding pattern,” Tarrant County Administrator G.K. Maenius said. “There’s nothing else we can do.”

News broke last week that the district clerk’s office had to stop receiving and processing passport applications, although local post offices could continue to do so.

State Department officials remain mum on any “violations” committed by the district clerk’s office, and the county declined to release the letter.

Local officials maintain that they don’t know why they received the stop order but hope to learn more soon.

“There was no clear issue stated in the letter,” Maenius said. “However, they were going to do a review of our processes. … They said there may be a violation. They didn’t say there was one.”

But the letter, dated June 24, indicated that the State Department planned to contact the county in three or four weeks, which means a response or further instructions could come any day.

‘Extremely frustrating’

Tarrant County Assistant District Attorney William T. Higgins sent a letter to Attorney General Ken Paxton this week arguing that the letter, requested by the Star-Telegram and at least one other media outlet, should not be released to the public because it “pertains to a pending investigation by the U.S. State Department.”

Meanwhile, some county officials say they continue to receive calls from people wanting to go through the county to renew or get a passport.

“They’re asking why [this is happening],” County Commissioner Gary Fickes said. “If we had the information, we would certainly be willing to give a better answer.

“It’s extremely frustrating,” he said. “We don’t know whether we are going to be open again. We don’t know anything.”

A note remains on the county’s website: “We regret that we cannot accept your passport application today, due to an issue with the U.S. Department of State. Hopefully, this issue will be resolved in the near future and we can once again serve you. We regret any inconvenience you may experience.”

Ongoing review

The state department continues to say little publicly about the investigation.

“We can confirm that passport acceptance facilities, excluding post offices, in Tarrant County, Texas have temporarily suspended accepting U.S. passport applications,” said Pooja Jhunjhunwala, a press officer for the State Department. “Applicants are encouraged to use alternate passport acceptance facilities to submit their applications.

“The Dallas Passport Agency is also nearby for applicants traveling within two weeks,” Jhunjhunwala said. “As a review is ongoing, we cannot comment on further details.”

District Clerk Tom Wilder said this is the first time the office has been told to not process passport applications since it began handling them, and passing them along to the State Department, 15 years ago.

He has said if he knew what the problem was, he would have already fixed it.

The county processed around 35,000 passport applications last year and had already processed about 33,000 this fiscal year which runs through Sept. 30, he said.

The county’s six passport offices remain open, so that residents can access other services. The county has been trying to open another passport office, in Hurst, to handle the local demand for passports but has yet to gain State Department approval for that.

“There are other things we do in there,” Wilder said. “We just can’t take passport applications.”

This story was originally published July 15, 2015 at 1:57 PM with the headline "Need a passport? Don’t look to Tarrant County."