U.S. Passports Can Be Revoked Over Tax Debt, Appeals Court Rules

A provision of federal law that allows the U.S. State Department to revoke the passports of delinquent taxpayers doesn’t violate their constitutional rights, the Tenth Circuit said Tuesday.

A provision of the 2015 Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act prohibited the State Department from issuing a new passport and authorized it to revoke an existing passport if notified by the Secretary of the Treasury that a taxpayer had $50,000 or more in federal tax debt, an amount adjusted for inflation beginning in 2016.

A Colorado man, Jeffrey T. Maehr, who said his passport was revoked after he built up more than ...