Several years ago, my ex-husband, in the aftermath of an unsuccessful attempt to gain custody of our daughter, contacted the State Department and made a claim that our daughter was in danger of an international abduction. His aim was to prevent me from obtaining a passport for her. This was a completely spurious claim. Fast forward to the present. In May a judge ordered my ex to sign the form allowing me to obtain a passport and in july subsequent allowed me to remove my daughter for temporary relocation overseas. In the course of the first hearing about the passport, ex revealed his earlier claim of child abduction to the State Department. He was at that time ordered to contact the State Department and withdraw that claim.
I applied for my daughter's passport in early June and requested expedited service. It then took a full 11 weeks, an extraordinary number of phone calls, and finally several in person appointments at the passport agency to discover that the problem was my ex husband's accusation about abduction, which he apparently never removed.
I am now pursuing civil contempt charges against my ex, but I am also wondering whether I have any recourse against the Department of State. Some pertinent facts, I think, are that my ex is a resident alien not a U.S. citizen, that the State Department never made any attempt to verify his claims, that repeated questions about whether this issue was holding up the passport were not answered, that offeres to produce my court orders met with no response.
I applied for my daughter's passport in early June and requested expedited service. It then took a full 11 weeks, an extraordinary number of phone calls, and finally several in person appointments at the passport agency to discover that the problem was my ex husband's accusation about abduction, which he apparently never removed.
I am now pursuing civil contempt charges against my ex, but I am also wondering whether I have any recourse against the Department of State. Some pertinent facts, I think, are that my ex is a resident alien not a U.S. citizen, that the State Department never made any attempt to verify his claims, that repeated questions about whether this issue was holding up the passport were not answered, that offeres to produce my court orders met with no response.