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Comment by jjcm | Hacker News Reader

As someone who was born in the US at home and had a delayed birth certificate, stuff like this worries me. I live overseas at the moment, and if the US one day decides to not grant me a passport renewal, what happens? Am I not allowed to return home?

I understand not allowing things like baptism certificates or non-government recognized birth certificates, but a certificate issued by the state should never be able to be revoked.

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You already have the passport. You are right to worry about aggressive misapplication of policy and an unabashedly nativist administration enabling it potentially causing some bureaucratic problem. Even a very unpleasant problem. You're not going to end up in a situation where you are 'not allowed to return home', though.

You already have the passport.

Unless I’m misreading, the person you replied to said, “if the US one day decides to not grant me a passport renewal”.

Any country that's not actually trying to arrest you or otherwise detain you and where your residence and travel documents have expired will happily put you in touch with a US Consulate and have you shipped home. Edward Snowden (just as a really extreme example) can probably be on plane to the US in 24 hours, should he choose to, revoked passport and all.

Your passport is not your citizenship status. It's the latter that grants you rights and those rights are very difficult to lose. And you can be repatriated with an expired passport (or no passport).

And it seems they are already denying renewals in some cases: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/us-is-deny...

I've gotten my passport renewed abroad before. I think the local embassy where you are would be pretty helpful in that situation.

This doesn’t seem to address the parent poster’s point. Like, at all.

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