D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
August 2009
Bordering on Frustration
Our intrepid correspondent gets a new "passport card" and lives to tell about it.
By Marjorie Lilly
I was asked by my boss to write a piece about getting passports under the new Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, which is a bureaucratic title that roughly translates: "You need a passport to go to Mexico now."
(It means more than this, but that's about all it means to most people in southwest New Mexico).
As of June 1, US citizens have been required to carry a passport while crossing the border into Mexico — or, more exactly, to get back into the US via Customs. It's the same passport you need to go to France or Venezuela.
There's also a new "passport card" devised by the Department of Homeland Security. It's to be distinguished from the traditional blue "passport book." The new card costs only about half of what the book does and has a limited use.
In late May I called the Post Office in Deming to find out how to get a passport card. Sometimes passport applications can be made at public libraries or at local government offices. I was given an appointment on August 11. I would have to wait 2 1/2 months.
So I called Silver City and Las Cruces to see where I could get a card faster. I usually have more things to do in Las Cruces than in Silver City, so I went to Cruces, even though I was told there were long lines there.
I went on the Internet and found out that the passport card will take you only to Mexico, Canada, to 17 countries in the Caribbean, and Bermuda. About a decade ago I drove a few times to Zacatecas and Guanajuato in central Mexico with only my US driver's license for an ID. But those days are over.
A passport card is only for land and sea use. You need a passport book for air travel anywhere outside the US.
The new card costs $45 for adults and $35 for kids under age 16, while the standard passport book costs $100 and $85, respectively. If you've gotten a passport in the last 15 years, you have to pay only $20. Consult travel.state.gov for more information.
You can get your passport picture taken at the Post Office, but it's less expensive at other places. I went to a small photo shop in Deming.
My hair had been getting pretty straggly, so I thought I'd put my best foot forward for this document that was going to last 10 years. I went to the beauty salon I'd been to for my last haircut, which was one of the best cuts I'd ever had. But when I got there, I hardly recognized the stylist, and she hardly knew me. She cut off so much I ended up looking like a duck.
I went to the photo shop to ask about passport pictures, and said I wanted to wait another day till my hair "settled down," as there were little cowlicks. What I was really yearning to do was wait until my hair reached a comfortable length, which has taken till now, a month and a half later. But I dutifully got my picture taken the next day.
The following day, June 4, I went to the Las Cruces Post Office near the Downtown Mall. I got there a little after nine and had to get a ticket and come back in the afternoon. That gave me time to fill out the fairly lengthy application form and do a couple of other things in town.
The application was pretty easy to complete until I got to where it asks for parents' birthdays and birthplaces. It's embarrassing, but I hardly remember anyone's birthday, within a few days, without looking them up in my address book.
So I ended up calling one of my sisters at work on the East Coast. She had no trouble remembering the birthdays, but we disagreed on the year my mother was born, believe it or not. I might have committed perjury on my passport, I don't know.
That afternoon I ended up waiting two hours in line, which wasn't too bad considering I could sit down sometimes and people were pretty friendly.
There was a Latino man (they were all Latino) who'd had a career in the Army and was spending his time traveling around. There was a girl I'd guess to be around 11 wrapping up a startlingly realistic baby doll in its blanket and changing its diaper very conscientiously.
A woman and her husband arrived from El Paso around 3:30 p.m. saying lines were ridiculously long there. They were going to stay in a motel that night.
Finally I got the temporary papers that would convince the border officials to let me across until I got the actual card. That's all that counted.
These new requirements are the result of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Act of 2004. It's taken the Department of Homeland Security almost eight years, since 9/11, to get these requirements in place.
It's funny how unconsciously I've been thinking that these new rules are a response to the drug violence on the border, not to the threat of Middle Eastern terrorists. The last year and a half of the nightmarish violence just over the Mexican border has blocked out fears of Islamic militants, for me at least. I should add that the legitimacy of media reports on Mexican violence crossing the border has been pretty much demolished.
There's a State Department travel advisory out for the whole US-Mexico border right now, but one needs to find out for oneself what the conditions are in each town. Agua Prieta, across from Douglas, Ariz., is peaceful, apparently, but Juarez and Palomas are still dicey. Some people stride across the border to Juarez with no qualms, while others are still terrified.
There's no longer a travel alert out for Mexico in regard to the swine flu epidemic, at least.
It took only four weeks to get my passport card in the mail, better than the possible six weeks that was predicted. It fits in my wallet and has a special little envelope that protects the RFID ("Radio-Frequency Identification") chip inside that border officials use to check your identity.
I'll only have to live with that photo for 10 years.
Marjorie Lilly writes the Borderlines column, which will be easier now
that she can cross the border and come back again.