My other objective in visiting Rio was visit with the U.S. Citizen Services unit, also known as ACS (American Citizen Services). I have been serving as the ACS officer in Brasília for about four months. Rio has a high number of U.S. citizens passing through as tourists or living in that area, so they see more cases and wider range of ACS sevices than we generally get in Brasília.
Most often, the ACS services we do are routine: renewing or replacing passports, registering the births of children born to U.S. citizens abroad, registering deaths, and notary services. We also respond to emergencies like hospitalizations, contacting relatives, and responding to disasters. The most common emergency is a lost or stolen passport. As a comparison, Rio averages about one emergency passport per day, while Brasília does one every couple of weeks. Consular officers can also approve repatriation loans to help destitute Americans return to the United States and assist with the distribution of Social Security benefits to retirees. Consular officers also visit jails and prisons to check on incarcerated Americans. Not all of these types of cases were seen this week, but there were two types of services that I had not yet done.
One was a case of a man wanting to renounce his citizenship. Renunciation of citizenship is a serious matter, especially if giving up U.S. citizenship would leave a person stateless or without a country of citizenship. In this case, the man said that his US citizenship was preventing him from opening a foreign currency exchange account in a Swiss bank, that recent changes in US banking laws made it impossible for him to do business, and that he was against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also complained about having to pay a significant fee to renounce citizenship.
Renouncing citizenship in this way is a two step process. At the consulate, the client states his reasons for abandiming citizenship during an intitial interview, and then returns at a later date after some reflection on his choice with the filled out paperwork and formally renounces citizenship in ceremony involving an oath. The paperwork is then sent to Washington, D.C., for review and a final decision at the State Department.
In this case, it became clear that he was prepared to argue his point and took a defensive stance. In the end, it's his choice as long as seems to be of a sound mind. (My colleagues told me about a regular visitor they get who wants to give up his citizenship so that the government would turn the chip off that was embedded in his head.) I also talked to him about how his choice would effect his children. I actually don't understand why someone would want to give their citizenship, especially after I have met with so many people who have made so many sacrifies in order to get American citizenship for themselves and their children.
On another day after a lunch, I went with the ACS officer and one of consular clerks to do a welfare and whereabouts visit for a child who had been taken by her mom from the U.S. without the dad's permission. They had not seen him since 2008, and this was the first meeting with a consular officer.
International abductions are complicated and emotional affairs, not only for the families involved, but also since the laws of different countries and international treaties. Cases can take years to come to a resolution, and even then may not result in a "happy" ending.
Anyway, it was an interesting visit. In these cases, consular officers are observers and do not advocate for the left-behind parent in the U.S, we are checking on the child. This time, we met at the mom's lawyer's office, and talked with them about school and home life. The girl seemed to be doing well, living happily with her mother, though she spoke about playing with her favorite dolls which were gifts from her father many years ago.
I don't have that much experience with these types of cases, but the few that have worked with involved a Brazilian woman that married an American man, and somewhere along the way they decide that they can't live together anymore, the husband gets a joint custody agreement that includes restrictions on travel for the child, and mom really wants to go back and live with her family, but won't go without the child, so she takes the child with her. Since she has broken U.S. law, she can't return with the child to the U.S., and Brazil favors mothers in custody cases, so she stays hidden in Brazil. It can be very traumatic and rarely has a clear or clean resolution. I don't know why the parents couldn't resolve their differences well enough to allow the child to visit dad (or mom).
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