WASHINGTON—Under President Joe Biden, the Administration for Children and Families was best known for trying to replace “the gender-specific term ‘paternity’ with the gender-neutral term ‘parentage.’” Under President Donald Trump, the office is taking a different approach.
Located within the Department of Health and Human Services, ACF’s Office of Child Support Enforcement has collected over $7 million in overdue child support payments by revoking passports of delinquent parents.
“That’s $7 million back into the hands of the custodial parent to benefit the child that wouldn’t have happened otherwise,” Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Adams told The Daily Wire, adding that the crackdown is part of the Trump administration’s push to promote healthy families.
“A lot of what we’ve been trying to prioritize in this administration is healthy marriage and responsible fatherhood, and ensuring fathers are in the child’s life, that children are given a chance to succeed, that obligations are being fulfilled,” Adams said.
Adams says the reasons given for delinquent payments are “all over the map,” but that many parents are “frankly shirking their responsibilities,” pointing to how quickly some fathers made massive payments in order to recover their passports.
In one instance, a California man cashed in a life insurance policy so he could cut a check for the $435,000 he owed to apply for a new passport, and a Connecticut man who had a mandatory business trip to Greece immediately coughed up $176,000 to get his passport back.
“If someone had a passport revoked and immediately they can go cut a $400,000 check to the custodial parent, that is highly suggestive of it not being a monetary issue,” Adams said. “It would be an issue of responsibility.”
The federal government has long had the power to take passports from parents who fall behind on child support, but it rarely used it. A 1996 law allows revocation for anyone owing more than $2,500, and until this year, it mostly blocked delinquent parents from getting a new passport or renewing one. Because passports last a decade, many parents with large debts faced no consequences for years.
That changed in May when the Trump administration began its crackdown, which Adams called “getting back to the basics.”
The Trump administration began the effort by shifting the Office of Child Support Enforcement’s focus from leftist cultural priorities to children’s needs. Under the Biden administration, the department had proposed changes such as replacing “the gender-specific term ‘paternity’ with the gender-neutral term ‘parentage.’”
“We’ve got to get back to child support enforcement,” Adams said of the Trump team’s approach to the Office of Child Support Enforcement.
In May, ACF partnered with the State Department to revoke passports of any parent who owed over $100,000 in child support, some 50,000 passports in total. By July, the agency had collected $1.5 million in past-due child support payments. Spurred by the program’s success, the Administration for Children and Families has begun revoking passports for parents who owe $10,000 or more in child support.
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