Check your passport, Americans are being stranded abroad and deported as US government is secretly voiding travel papers

This is absolutely wild, you guys. We’re seeing alarming reports from American travelers who are landing in overseas destinations only to find out their seemingly valid passports have been secretly and quietly canceled by the Trump’s government. This isn’t just an inconvenience; we’re talking about travelers facing detention and even deportation because their travel documents were flagged as lost or stolen, often without their knowledge or consent. It’s a terrifying situation that’s costing people huge amounts of money and stress.

Travelers are generally flying out of the US without any trouble at all. The problem only surfaces when foreign border agents check the document against the Interpol database. That’s when the alert pops up, marking the passport as invalid. Because the alert happens abroad, people have zero advance warning until they are already sitting across from an immigration officer. This forces an immediate, costly scramble to a U.S. embassy.

One of the most extreme cases involves Parker, who shared his traumatizing experience. He traveled through multiple countries on his vacation, but when he arrived in Thailand, immigration officials flagged his passport. Parker was deported from Thailand. What’s truly bizarre is that he said the document was marked lost even before he received it in the mail. When he called the National Passport Information Center, he said they gave him the complete runaround, per Daily Dot. “They said they have no idea what I’m talking about. They’ve never heard of the situation before,” he explained.

The government isn’t trying to help anyone

Even more confusing, Parker found that in their system, his passport wasn’t marked as lost at all. This kind of contradictory information must be traumatizing, and it’s awful that he and his girlfriend had to go through that.

This issue isn’t limited to deportation, though. It also creates a massive bureaucratic and financial headache for people just trying to enjoy their trips. Take Marcy, for example, whose trip to Rome turned into an embassy scramble. Italian officials told her there was an Interpol alert on her passport, claiming someone had reported it lost or stolen. Marcy swore she never made the report. The officials bizarrely claimed the report stemmed from an MTA bus incident months earlier, which made little sense to her.

Even though she was allowed entry, she still had to visit the U.S. embassy. She had to swear under oath that she never reported the passport missing, and then she had to pay $165 just for a temporary emergency passport. She later faced additional replacement fees once she got home. Marcy put it perfectly, saying, “My passport should have never been canceled by somebody else.”

What’s concerning is how long the system can stay broken without anyone noticing. Another traveler shared that her passport was confiscated by JFK officials upon returning from Spain. The document had been marked lost years earlier. She had used it to apply for Global Entry and book international travel in the intervening time, which really shows how poorly these systems are communicating with each other.

It’s clear the US government’s system is broken when you can successfully use an allegedly voided document for highly sensitive applications and trips. This whole situation is unbelievably frustrating. It’s nearly impossible to cancel a gym membership, but apparently, the government can void your critical travel document without telling you.

This could happen to anyone, and the biggest issue travelers are pointing out is that there is no easy, quick way to check the status of your passport before you book a flight or head to the airport. You’re completely reliant on a system that is clearly riddled with errors. If you’re planning international travel, you really need to figure out how to verify your documents are clean, or you could unknowingly face detention or deportation.

Remember, this is only getting worse because of the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolàs Maduro, and ICE killing people. It makes it hard to trust the US.