A Border Made of Paper: CPIAP, Two-Parent Consent, and Preventing Abduction from a Country With No Exit Controls

Executive Summary

The United States, which handles the world's largest volume of Hague cases, has no exit controls — no one checks who leaves the country. So American prevention works on the document rather than the border: since 2001, a US passport for a child under 16 requires both parents' consent, and the Children's Passport Issuance Alert Program (CPIAP) notifies an enrolled parent whenever anyone applies for that child's passport. It is, in effect, a border made of paper. This article explains how the system works, and — in the government's own words — its two holes: children who hold a second nationality can get a foreign passport on another country's rules, and even a documented child can simply be flown out because no one checks the exit. The complete prevention architecture (US document controls plus UK-style departure controls) exists nowhere. This is educational, not legal advice.

Introduction

The previous article described Britain's border machine: port alerts on the police computer, a court officer seizing passports, an island where every exit is a gate (article #18). The United States — the country with the world's largest Hague caseload — has none of that. The United States has no exit controls. No officer checks documents on the way out; no court order flags a name at departure gates; a parent with a child and a boarding pass simply leaves. The State Department says so itself, in plain words, on its own prevention pages.

So American prevention was forced to be inventive. If you cannot stop the traveller at the border, you stop the document before the journey exists. The American system is a border made of paper — and its story, including the holes in the paper, is one every country weighing prevention policy should study.

Legal Background: prevention, not return

Most of this series concerns the Hague Convention's return remedy — what happens after a child is wrongfully taken abroad. This article is about prevention: the domestic tools that aim to stop a wrongful removal from happening at all. In the United States, prevention is built almost entirely on passport controls (two-parent consent and issuance alerts), because the country does not check who leaves at the border. These are not Hague remedies; they are the front-end that, when it works, means the Convention's back-end is never needed.

What happened

The system's origin is legislative, and it is a left-behind parents' story. Through the 1990s, a US passport for a child could be obtained by one parent, alone. Parents planning removals used that fact; parents who had been left behind discovered, again and again, that the travel document enabling their child's disappearance had been issued lawfully, on one signature, by their own government. Advocacy by those parents — documented in the congressional record of the era — produced Section 236 of Public Law 106-113 (the Foreign Relations Authorization Act, signed November 1999), and in June 2001 the State Department's implementing rule took effect.

The rule is the two-parent consent requirement: a US passport for a child under 16 requires both parents (or guardians) to consent — ideally both appearing, or one appearing with the other's notarized consent on Form DS-3053. Exceptions exist — sole legal custody documented by court order, or "exigent/special family circumstances" on Form DS-5525 — but the default flipped: the passport, the only practical gate out of an exit-control-free country, now requires two signatures.

Around the rule, the Department built the Children's Passport Issuance Alert Program (CPIAP) — which its own 2025 Annual Report calls "one of our strongest tools to prevent IPCA" [US 2025 report, p. 9]. A parent (or court) enrols a child; from then on, any US passport application for that child anywhere in the world triggers notification to the enrolled parent before issuance — typically converting a covert plan into a contested one while everyone is still in the same country. Enrolment is free, applies until the child turns 18, and sits alongside the Department's dedicated prevention team, which fielded more than 15,000 prevention inquiries in 2024 alone.

The successes, as with all prevention, are non-events — flights never booked, applications withdrawn after the alert letter arrived. Nobody publishes the count. What is documented, in the government's own FAQs, are the two holes in the paper.

Case Study Analysis — the two holes, in the government's own words

1. The dual-national loophole. The State Department's prevention FAQ states it without varnish: CPIAP and the two-parent rule govern US passports only. A child who is also a citizen of another country can receive that country's passport from its embassy on its rules — and many countries issue to one parent alone. The Department's own position is that it cannot prevent a foreign government from issuing its own passport, which describes reality for millions of binational families — precisely the families in which abduction risk lives. The partial fixes are procedural and imperfect: US courts can order all passports, foreign ones included, surrendered to a neutral holder; and parents can write to the relevant embassy enclosing custody orders and request a hold — some countries honour such requests, some do not, and no treaty compels them.

2. The open exit. Even a documented child must be checked to be stopped, and the US does not systematically check people leaving by air, land or sea. For non-US-citizen taking parents there exists a narrow instrument — the Prevent Departure Program, a Department of Homeland Security lookout that can flag an alien subject to it — but for the standard case, a US-citizen parent with valid documents, there is no American equivalent of Britain's port alert. When departure is truly imminent, the practical playbook runs through police (state warrants, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the FBI in parental-kidnapping scenarios) and airline/court improvisation — a scramble, not a system.

The honest comparative conclusion: the US built among the strongest document controls and among the weakest departure controls; the UK, the reverse emphasis (article #18). A family's protection depends, arbitrarily, on which architecture their country chose. That arbitrariness — visible only when systems are laid side by side — is exactly the kind of finding a country-by-country prevention audit exists to surface.

What This Shows About the Limits of the Hague Convention Alone

The US case shows that prevention is a national responsibility the Convention cannot discharge. The treaty is the remedy after a removal; whether a removal happens at all depends on a country's own document and departure controls, which vary enormously and interlock badly. The US closed one gap (single-parent passports) with a rule that took a decade of parental advocacy to win — and left two others open by design or by constitutional choice. The deeper limit is that no country has built the complete prevention system, so children remain protected against one route and exposed on another, based on nothing more principled than which country they happen to live in.

What Parents and Professionals Should Understand

For US parents with any concern, the single highest-value, lowest-cost step — a prompt to act, not legal advice — is to enrol the child in CPIAP: it is free, lasts to 18, and requires no court order or lawyer, converting a secret plan into a notified one. If risk is concrete, seek court orders covering all passports (US and foreign, surrendered to court or counsel), notify the relevant embassies with the order attached, and document everything for the DS-3053/DS-5525 record. For binational families, assume the second passport exists or can — prevention that covers only the US document covers half the exits, so ask a lawyer about the other country's issuance rules before it matters. For policymakers everywhere, the complete architecture — two-parent issuance plus issuance alerts (US) and port alerts, passport seizure and an on-duty enforcement officer (UK) — exists nowhere, and building it would cost a fraction of a single year of litigation.

Limitations

This is a systems and policy analysis of official US programs as of current guidance; procedures can change. Prevention efficacy is genuinely unmeasured, here and everywhere — no country publishes how many abductions its prevention machinery stops. The article does not address the many state-law tools that also bear on prevention. It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified lawyer in an urgent situation.

Conclusion

The United States prevents abduction with paper because it will not police its own exit — a genuine civil-liberties choice with a genuine, documented cost, paid in this field by left-behind parents. The two-parent rule and CPIAP are real, valuable, and free; they are also, by the government's own account, half a wall. The lesson for every country is the same one this series keeps reaching: the cheapest justice in this field is the abduction that never happens — and no state has yet built the whole system that would deliver it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the United States check people leaving the country to prevent child abduction? No. The US has no systematic exit controls. Its prevention system works on the passport instead — two-parent consent for issuance and the CPIAP alert program.

What is CPIAP, and does it cost anything? The Children's Passport Issuance Alert Program lets a parent or court enrol a child so that any US passport application for that child triggers a notification before issuance. Enrolment is free and lasts until the child turns 18.

Can CPIAP stop my child getting a foreign passport? No. CPIAP and the two-parent rule apply only to US passports. A child who is also a citizen of another country may be able to get that country's passport under its rules. This is a known loophole; courts can order all passports surrendered, and parents can ask foreign embassies to flag the child, though not all comply.

What does "two-parent consent" require? For a US passport for a child under 16, both parents (or guardians) must consent — appearing together, or one with the other's notarized consent (Form DS-3053) — unless an exception applies (sole legal custody by court order, or exigent/special circumstances on Form DS-5525).