• No guidance exists in the Code of Federal Regulations or the FAM concerning the agency’s burden of proof in passport revocation decisions.555 • There is no system for tracking passport retentions. • Although federal regulations and the FAM required notification and post-revocation hearings in passport revocation cases, in practice passports were retained for sometimes years at a time, amounting to de facto revocation and confiscation without the benefit of these procedural protections.556 • The State Department did not follow the policies in place for handling passport retention, including notifying applicants about the insufficiency of their documentation.557 The DOS-OIG issued four recommendations based on its findings: • Develop databases to track and manage passport revocations, retentions, and confiscations. • Issue guidance on the procedures required to revoke and confiscate passports. • Clarify the circumstances in which individuals are entitled to limited-validity passports to return to the United States if their documentation is taken while they are abroad. • Clarify the role of the legal adviser as the senior legal authority for the department, including considering whether attorneys in other offices should report directly to the legal adviser.558 The State Department concurred with all of the DOS-OIG’s recommendations.559 None had been implemented at the time the DOS-OIG issued its report in October 2018. Based on the Justice Initiative’s research, the lack of implementation persists at the time of writing. In its official response to the DOS-OIG review, the State Department justifies its conduct by claiming that every passport decision raises an issue of national security. “One wrongfully issued valid passport, especially one issued in a false identity, poses an ongoing threat to U.S. national security and border security.” 560 Such a blanket approach fails to accord with basic standards of proportionality. According to one lawyer who works closely with Yemeni-Americans affected by these policies, an abstract fear of terrorist plots to infiltrate the American homeland “has driven the exceptionalization of Yemeni Americans and has distorted the legal processes that deal with them.”561 In the United Kingdom, researchers Nisha Kapoor and Kasia Narkowicz interviewed British citizens who were pre-emptively deprived of passports (as discussed in the Comparative Case Studies section of Chapter I, History and Context). The researchers note the government’s tendency to rely on “collective punishment,” racial profiling, and “guilt by association,” in the administration of the Home Secretary’s Royal Prerogative to remove passports.562 Their study also identified a growing problem of “deprivation by the back door,” whereby authorities III. Denial and revocation of documentation of U.S. citizenship 123