“Sex offender” question to be asked on passport applications.

International Megan’s Law to Prevent Child Exploitation and Other Sexual Crimes Through Advanced Notification of Traveling Sex Offenders, known as IML, requires the State Department to include a unique identifier in the passports of registered sex offenders covered under the law based on their conviction for a sex offense against a minor. When an offender travels internationally, this identifier enables the U.S. Marshals Service National Sex Offender Targeting Center (NSOTC) to inform destination countries, and DSS to notify regional security officers.

Although IML specifically authorizes the department to ask passport applicants their sex offender registration status to identify who is covered by the law, Mr. May learned that application forms currently do not include this question. Further, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not have the capacity to preemptively check the estimated 900,000 registered sex offenders in the U.S. to determine who is covered by IML. Counterparts in DHS’ Angel Watch Center (AWC) indicated to Mr. May that, if checked, as many as 500,000 of those individuals have convictions against children and would therefore require a unique passport identifier. By asking the question of applicants, AWC could focus on offenders most likely to travel.

Since the law was implemented in 2017, NSOTC and AWC have urged the department to include the question of sex offender registration status on the passport application form, as intended by the IML authors. Instead, Mr. May found that the department actively denied the request for years, suggesting that anyone honest enough to answer such a question would also volunteer their registration status on the form without being asked. In reality, the policy garnered just 80 self-declarations out of an estimated 60,000 covered offenders who most likely applied for passports from 2017 to 2020.

To address this critical omission, Mr. May organized stakeholder meetings with the Bureau of Consular Affairs, AWC, NSOTC, and DSS. He informed department leadership that IML implementation problems were also of grave concern to America’s leading child protection organizations, nonprofits, and reporting centers, drawing the attention of the department’s own Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons and the White House’s National Security Council.

Mr. May dedicated significant time and expertise to improving the passport application process in order to combat the sexual exploitation of children. He repeatedly raised the issue to the appropriate bodies within the department, despite the risks involved. as some in senior positions continually dismissed the problem and rebuffed proposed improvements to the system.

“I am most perplexed as to why we have resisted so,” he tells the Journal. “At first, some in the department misunderstood the scope of the problem, believing that the number of potentially covered offenders under IML was 5,000 and not 500,000. But even after we saw the true number, no progress was made.”

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