Passport law irks border-crossers
Like many Midwestern retirees who spend winters on the Texas border, Fred Farley doesn’t have a passport. So when he heard he’d need one to cross back from Mexico, he wondered if he would still make occasional trips to buy handicrafts.
“You about have to live down here to make it pay for itself,” the 71-year-old from Blue Grass, Iowa, said Friday of the $97 cost of getting a passport.
But word Friday that President Bush ordered a review of the newly passed requirement relieved frequent border-crossers such as Farley and local businesses, who say they’d be devastated by a lack of binational traffic.
“Bush is not my man,” Farley said, “but in this case, I do agree with him.”
Bush signed law
The requirement to have passports or other approved documents was included in Congress’ massive Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which Bush signed in December.
On April 5, State and Homeland Security officials announced a timetable to require passports even for short trips to Mexico or Canada by 2008. Though the law says “other documents” may be accepted, State Department fact sheets do not list driver’s licenses or birth certificates among those documents. At present, both are accepted.
More: chron.com
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Bush backs off passports for border travel
Plans requiring passports from people entering the United States don’t pass muster with President Bush, who has ordered a review of this border security effort amid fears it would impede legal travel from Canada, Mexico and other U.S. neighbors.
The president said Thursday he was surprised by the proposed rules announced last week by the State and Homeland Security departments.
“When I first read that in the newspaper about the need to have passports, particularly today’s crossings that take place, about a million for instance in the state of Texas, I said, ‘What’s going on here?”’
