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Wonder what really happens at the consulates? Find out in the Isaac Brock Society’s Consulate Report Directory, currently 274 pages of first-hand accounts of renunciation/relinquishment appointments, arranged by consulate location, along with links to further information and the required Dept of State forms.
Reports are updated as consulate visit stories are posted on the website.
You can post here or elsewhere on the site (we’ll keep an eye out for them). Some comments may be excerpted or condensed slightly in the consulate reports. The original posts and comments remain on their threads are not edited.
Thanks to everyone for sharing your experiences…and keep ’em coming! It’s a new experience for everyone and your information is really helpful.
To change or delete your report in the Directory, you can post the change as a comment on this thread or e-mail Pacifica@isaacbrocksociety.ca
Click here for the Consulate Report Directory
2013.02.12. As of today, this discussion now continues at Part 2. Please click here to go to Consulate Report Directory (Brockers describe their Consulate Meetings) Part 2.
That form is so nuts, it’s comical! Definitely made me wonder about the mental health of a government that would have have such a form even get to the proposal stage. I kinda expected to find “April Fool!” in big letters when I reached the last page.
I got a kick out of them asking the dates of mother’s pre-natal visits. Do they think I was taking notes at the time?
I have a secret security clearance, the application for that was rather long and bit pesky to fill out, but it seemed relevant and I can’t say there was anything outrageous or bizarre in it. Like, duh, Canadians realise that the address of my elementary school doesn’t have any impact on national security.
@Pacifica –
Come to think of it, I had a secret security clearance too, back in the ’90s (it’s not as glamorous as it sounds), and the questionnaire wasn’t anything like as detailed as this.
*Makes you wonder what sort of questions security clearance requires these days.
<@Medea and Halifax. I have a Cdn secret clearance currently. Even now, the application isn't anything remotely like this US form we're discussing. Stuff like former addresses and work, for example, only go back ten years(could be a hassle to if you'd had a lot of temporary jobs, of course, but it's not all this stuff since (or before) birth! The questions, as I recall, seem to be logical in that they are the kind of things that the government could actually check up on and verify (unlike that truly bizarre US passport questionnaire). I'd say that the security clearance application questions seem to be relevant, or at least relevant enough that no question on it ever made me crack up with laughter or shake my head in complete bewilderment! I swear if Badger had posted that on April 1st ... :)
@pacifica, and all;
It was wierd enough to read the first version of the questionnaire http://papersplease.org/wp/2011/04/27/state-dept-already-using-illegal-passport-questionnaire/ , and happy to see that it was initially denied http://www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;dct=FR+PR+N+O+SR+PS;rpp=10;po=0;D=DOS-2011-0055 but now to see it has resurfaced again – well, another of the many Orwellian http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four or Kafkaesque http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial moments that have become all too familiar.
See very thorough update and analysis here : http://papersplease.org/wp/2012/09/24/state-dept-admits-passport-form-was-illegal-but-still-wants-it-approved/
In reluctant fairness to the State Department (and I think everyone here knows by now I am NOT a fan of the US), the story on the Nestmann site isn’t actually fair or accurate. If you click on his link to DS-5520 the State Department form, you get a PDF file. Have a look at it, it isn’t quite as intrusive or insane as described. The version I get on my screen asks only for the following:
name, birth date and place, and current address of all parents, step parents, and siblings
name, address, and time of employment for your last three places of employment
name, city, state/country and dates of every school you’ve attended inside or outside the US
your last five residences including dates by month
and that’s it, that’s all (except your signature and personal info at the top of page 1)
None of the other stuff mentioned is anywhere I can find on that form. As usual they have the rather optimistic response burden time estimate (in this case, 45 minutes which maybe is more realistic than the 15 minutes they claim for form 4079 including digging up all the info).
So either they’ve quickly cleaned up the form, or Nestmann is playing a bit fast and fancy with his reporting. No idea which. Maybe he’s working from an earlier draft (which is pretty bad in itself, that any serious State Department employee would come up with a form asking all that stuff about who was in your delivery room when you were born for example) but I don’t see anything like that on the form I got from the state.gov website.
Let’s not turn this into another “urban legend” unless it’s really true, and at the moment I don’t think it is.
To check for yourself, just Google “DS-5520” and look at the PDF that pops up from the reginfo.gov link which is currently the third link from the top on the first page of search results.
@schubert, look at form DS-5513, which still has the pre-natal care questions, etc.
“The State Department is now seeking approval for a (slightly) revised Form DS-5513 as well as a new Form DS-5520, also for passport applicants, containing many of the same questions.
The State Department no longer wants you to tell the passport
examiner about the circumstances of your circumcision, but does still
want to know the dates and locations of all of your mother’s pre- and
post-natal medical appointments, how long she was hospitalized for your
birth, and a complete list of everyone who was in the room when you were
born. The revised forms no longer ask for all the addresses at which
you have lived, but only for those addresses you are least likely to
know: all the places you lived from birth until age 18.”… from http://papersplease.org/wp/2012/09/24/state-dept-admits-passport-form-was-illegal-but-still-wants-it-approved/
Here is the federal register notice https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2012/07/02/2012-16142/30-day-notice-of-proposed-information-collection-ds-5513-supplemental-questionnaire-to-determine https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/search?commit=Go&conditions%5Bterm%5D=ds-5513&order=newest&quiet=true
@Badger OK I see what you mean. That form 5513 is utterly insane, particularly the questions concerning who was in the birthing room when you were born and what medical appointments your mother had with whom and when during her pregnancy or up to a year after your birth. Particularly for those of us whose parents are long dead (and whose medical practitioners at the time very likely also are long dead), how the hell can one answer those questions?
Form 5520 on the other hand strikes me as reasonable, given its purpose (to get more information to support or deny a passport application, probably for applicants who don’t have a readable or any birth certificate and can’t get one – and that can happen for example with people born in displaced-persons camps in some parts of Europe after WWII, such as a good friend of my wife and me). But, in her case, names of persons present at her birth? It is to laugh, or scream in rage. Maybe the list of everyone in the camp, just to be safe … And she was probably delivered by a Red Cross nurse in the D.P. camp and where are you going to get that name? Keeping logs of the names of staff, never mind camp inhabitants, never mind issuing birth certificates, wasn’t a big priority at the time and circumstances.
However that then raises a question in my mind, does 5520 replace 5513 or is it supplementary? Very confusing, not clear to me why they’d have two different forms for essentially the same purpose (one would think from the instructions on them and the titling). And that still begs the question, what wingnut came up with form 5513 in the first place and why? And how could something that absurd get through the approval process?
More evidence of a severely dysfunctional government and country, I’d say. Not that we needed any more evidence …
I guess we’ve all (including me) drifted a bit off-thread here, this has little to do with renouncing and relinquishing, except to give more reasons why one might want to do one or the other asap, to be free of the asylum.
@schubert, the links to the federal register entries for the forms does provide some description of the general rationale (see section https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2012/07/02/2012-16142/30-day-notice-of-proposed-information-collection-ds-5513-supplemental-questionnaire-to-determine#p-28 ), and the other link seems to be saying that one form is a supplemental one for the other.
There is a mention of the difficulties that senior persons might have with providing some of the information, but doesn’t really acknowledge it as valid – and this revision was apparently partially based on substantial submissions and commentary criticizing the earlier version that did not pass. https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2012/07/02/2012-16142/30-day-notice-of-proposed-information-collection-ds-5513-supplemental-questionnaire-to-determine#p-3
This may explain why the Department of State wants to know who attended the birth if it was not in a hospital: https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2009/06/26-4
@Shadow Raider, Tiger and others — and getting back to Tiger’s being messed around because of some unbelievably finicky nit-picking about her birth certificate and marriage certificate.
That link you posted Shadow Raider is REALLY intriguing for reasons you perhaps didn’t initially suspect. Halfway down the article, in the eighth paragraph from the top to be specific, mention is made that the (successful) lawsuit against DOS re processing of Mexican-American passport applications where the applicant was delivered by a midwife, is mentioned a piece of US legislation I’d never heard of before — the Administrative Procedure Act, “which was enacted as a safeguard against arbitrary and capricious government agency procedures. During the course of the litigation, several of the plaintiffs were granted passports even though they had been denied previously on the very same showing of evidence of citizenship.”
Hmm, “safeguard against arbitrary and capricious government agency procedures.” Gosh, where have we heard of such things before … maybe at the Ottawa embassy and the Vancouver consulate, perhaps? What about people in Calgary, Toronto, and Halifax not to mention numerous European locations getting birth and marraige certificates accepted, not to mention one interview, not two, for the same CLN process, without huge delays between interviews, but not in Vancouver or Ottawa? Sounds pretty damned “arbitrary and capricious” to me, in the latter cases.
Anyone thinking about “lawyering up” to deal with stuff like that might want to take note of the name of that Act and encourage the lawyer to look into it. Sounds to me like certain US consulates in Canada are sitting ducks for a lawsuit under their own country’s legislation …
Nice find. Well done. Pass it along …
Good find ShadowRaider, thank you. And interesting to know that the ACLU was working on this case regarding the denial of US passports in relation to the stringent requirements to use the US passport when crossing into the US – from Mexico, (and Canada as well as other non-N.A. countries).
Had no idea that being birthed by a midwife could prevent one from getting a US passport, as this lawsuit addresses. There are lots of European countries, like the Netherlands, where midwived births are very common. Any duals reading here who’ve experienced trouble getting a US passport because of being born at home rather than in a hospital?
And, wondering if this *Administrative Procedure Act could be invoked to assist those we’ve heard reports of at IBS, being denied the ability to relinquish in one appointment rather than two, or having to wait for months between appointments to complete the renunciation. Or, as in the case of tiger, having their official birth document refused at a relinquishment appointment, even though the actual relinquishing act happened decades ago, and was swearing out an oath of citizenship to Canada at a time when that act was treated by the US as an automatic forfeit of US citizenship. I would call forcing those in tiger’s situation to bear the onus of proving that their status was lost, after the US changed its mind retroactively, and then forcing all affected to procure CLNs decades after the fact “arbitrary and capricious” behaviour. Too bad we can’t get the ACLU on this case as well – since choosing to end your citizenship is a constitutionally protected right and recognized as an international human right.
“The lawsuit also charged that the
Department’s practices were violating the *Administrative Procedure Act,
which was enacted as a safeguard against arbitrary and capricious
government agency procedures. During the course of the litigation,
several of the plaintiffs were granted passports even though they had
been denied previously on the very same showing of evidence of
citizenship. ” https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2009/06/26-4
And routinely requiring 2 to 3 hours of questioning in order to apply for a CLN doesn’t sound like standard administrative procedure, but it does sound arbitrary and capricious.
@schubert – beat me to it!
@tiger and all, wonder if Flott and Flott http://www.accidentaluscitizen.com/current-relinquishment-cases-in-canada-demonstrate-the-need-for-guidance/ who had contacted the State Dept. re the inconsistent treatment of clients relinquishing/renouncing (“The uncertainty of the process, the lack of familiarity with it, and the
absence of guidance in the FAM has already resulted in quite different
procedures being used at two consulates in Ontario.“) cited the aforementioned “Administrative Procedure Act, which was enacted as a safeguard against arbitrary and capricious government agency procedures” in their comments to the DOS.
Note to administrators: Edit and request delete function not working currently.
@Schubert, Badger and all
Yesterday I said that I was starting to feel like Alice when she fell down the hole. But today I have not a doubt that I am in a Kafka novel. Yesterday afternoon, much to my surprise at the speed, I received from Cook County my certified civil marriage certificate and my certified birth certificate. I cheered. Then I looked closely at them and thought – oh,oh, this birth certificate might not pass muster. The birth certificate has the filing date on it (3 days after the birth) but it did not have my parents’ names on it. I had specifically requested one with their names and the filing date.
So last night I sent off the information to the Consulate. Bright and early this A.M. I received the following email from the ACS chief – his words – “Since your birth certificate is your evidence of U.S. citizenship, we need to ensure that it meets all legal standards as primary evidence of citizenship. In order to do so, the birth certificte needs to show the filing date within a year of your birth and list your parents’ names.”
Okay, I thought. Now that makes 3 birth certificates, all rejected – 1 is blurred, 1 is a photocopy of a ‘certified’ birth certificate and the final one is missing some information. My next thought was perhaps it meant I really was born, but it was an Immaculate Conception, no mother, no father. I must have been born because I did get the Marriage Certificate.
Next, I phone Cook County, Vital Records and explain the problem. Oh, they say all of our birth records between the years 1940 and 1949 were never scanned into the computer, so we can’t provide the full long form certificate. Guess that means both of my sisters and one brother also won’t have birth certificates. Means my youngest brother is an only child. Wonder if I should phone him and tell him that. Cook suggests I talk to the Illinois Department of Public Health. Perhaps they could provide the needed document. More time on hold on a long distance call. Finally, I get a live person and they tell me what website to order it from but oh, no, the website asks for my SSN to prove my identity and I don’t have one. Back to the phone, and back to sending documents by fax, and I still don’t know whether I will get a certificate or not. I really am not sure I exist. Perhaps this is all a novel, a very scary, evil novel.
*@tiger,
The ACS chief wrote, “Since your birth certificate is your evidence of U.S. citizenship, we need to ensure that it meets all legal standards as primary evidence of citizenship.” The question remains: Why on Earth do you need to provide evidence of U.S. citizenship that is PERFECT in all the respects that they seem to require, when what you are trying to do is document your RELINQUISHMENT of U.S. citizenship?? Have you asked them that directly?
Well, there’s that, yes. OTOH the first step in the decision tree for loss of citizenship is to establish whether the person has citizenship in the first place. The details of this case sound perverse, I admit, but I’d be surprised if any other country does it all that differently.
The Canadian version of the DS4079 asks for all kinds of information: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/pdf/kits/citizen/CIT0302E.pdf
Also, one reason to be very careful about establishing someone’s identity is the possibility that a malicious person could renounce citizenship while pretending to be someone else, leaving them to deal with the consequences some unknown time down the road.
@AnonAnon and broken man,
I can not help but see the absurdity of what I am going through right now. I haven’t pointed it out to the anyone at the consulate as I literally don’t trust them to not be vindictive. It really could not be more ironic, I am spending mountains of time and a fair bit of money so that I can prove to them that I once was an American who relinquished that citizenship, decades ago.
I also do understand your point, broken man. Although, I would think it an unlikely event, it would not be impossible in today’s world, to understand that they need to prevent a ‘malicious person’ from renouncing the citizenship of another.
What I think the whole thing might just be is a bureaucracy gone insane with rules. As was pointed out by others on this site, DOS has rules regarding renunciation but not rules regarding relinquishment. So they are attempting to apply the rules of one act to another act and it doesn’t quite fit. They need to get a new set of rules for CLN’s obtained through the relinquishment of citizenship and perhaps equally important rules need to be applied consistently across all consulates and embassies.
@tiger,
You have documented all of your steps now. It’s up to them — if in this latest attempt you receive the certificate that they require to prove you are you, fine. If they do not accept, you have done all possible to obtain what they ask for. Maybe time to leave it and have them prove that you are a US citizen and have any responsibility to the US IRS, perhaps with the advice of a lawyer. And, yes, if they do not prove that you are a US citizen, then it will have positive consequences for your sons. Your situation shows the height of absurdity and hypocrisy of the US in its determination of who is a citizen and who is not.
And, yes, there certainly needs to be consistency of the procedure from Consulate to Consulate for both relinquishments (for which there seems to be no rules) to renunciations — the questions asked, documentation required, number of appointments for both. To whom in the Department of State do we voice our concerns? Is there an equivalent Nina Olson, US Taxpayer Advocate?
@ tiger
It would take a truly determined and perverse malicious person to wade through this swamp of bureaucracy to fraudulently renounce citizenship on behalf of another. Someone who enjoys hitting himself in the head with a hammer perhaps. I’m so sorry this has worked out for you the way it has. Keep us posted on your progress.
@Hijacked 2012 and Tiger.
Excellent point, Hijacked! What’s really perverse and malicious is putting Tiger through all this crap about her birth certificate and her marriage certificate. She wants to document the years-ago LOSS of her US citizenship, not trying to get a US passport. She has a Canadian passport (which required Canadian review and acceptance of both certificates, I’m sure) which has her photo, as no doubt does her driver’s license which she also presented. Surely to goodness they don’t think she’s impersonating the “real” Tiger? All they need do is compare the two photos in front of them with the face of the person across the desk from them. A monkey could do that.
This whole story is what gives bureaucracy and bureaucrats (and an unfortunately and certainly in this case deserved) bad name. This is mindless, stupid, and moronic. I was going to say “what are they thinking,” but the whole point is, they obviously aren’t thinking or seemingly capable of thinking.
It’s hard to fathom that the same country and educational system that can produce people in NASA who can put a sophisticated robot rover on Mars also produces bureaucrats like the ones in the Vancouver consulate. Something doesn’t quite fit here. That’s assuming we take the generous interpretation that what Tiger is encountering is stupidity or ignorance or thoughtlessness and not actual, deliberate malice.
@Schubert,
Exactly! I keep going back and forth with being convinced it is ‘malice’, perhaps coming from the top down at the Vancouver consulate or is it complete inefficiency, and ineptitude. No wonder I feel like I am right in the middle of a Franz Kafka novel.
The good news on the document front, is that today I heard from Illinois Department of Public Health, Vital Statistics that the birth certificate should be leaving their office today. (I phoned them, no email that it is on its way as they promised on the website).As Monday is a holiday in both countries, I would expect the earliest it would be here is Tuesday. This will be my fourth birth certificate. If it is not the ‘acceptable to the Vancouver consulate’ version, I am going to give up. I can not continue to put myself through all this. Too much time, effort, money and LCUs.
You know back in 1972, when I became a Canadian citizen, I obviously had to present a birth certificate that was accepted by Canada. I got my first passport in I believe 1990. Again, my birth certificate was accepted by Passport Canada. As my second birth certificate, the one that is so clear but they would not consider, has the date (certified copy, 1993) on it, it was not presented to Passport Canada. They accepted birth certificate #1. Yet, the U.S. will not accept either one. I would so love to ask them if they see the irony of someone who obviously looks like me, trying to pretend to be me in order to apply for a loss of nationality.