Stu Bykofsky: Pottstown man denied passport, but feds won't say why

MICHAEL HUDSON IS a prisoner of America.

An American citizen, he's not in jail. He's in a small house in Pottstown, and the State Department won't give him a passport and won't say why. Hudson thinks it has something to do with being a black man who looks a bit "Iranian."

But he was issued a passport in 1993, valid for 10 years. He tried to renew it last June.

Since then, the Pottstown police have come to check on him, he's been interviewed by what he says was the CIA (more likely the Secret Service, but the guy in the suit didn't give Hudson a business card) and someone in a dark blue car parked across the street took pictures of him.

Hudson has no criminal record. I checked.

Does the State Department think he's a terrorist? Things changed after 9/11. What once was considered mere eccentricity now may be considered a threat.

To get answers, I call the government. While I'm waiting, I drive up to Pottstown to take Hudson's temperature.

He's hot because the government won't give him a passport and won't return his birth certificate. He'll get that back, he was told, when he either gets the passport or withdraws his request.

That seems like a faceless bureaucrat trying to dodge a decision. They want Hudson to withdraw his application.

The odyssey of the 54-year-old Hudson began last June, when he applied for a passport so that he could visit his 19-year-old son, Michael, who lives in Bermuda. Hudson was hoping to go in July, but when he hadn't received his passport by August, he called the regional office in Portsmouth, N.H., and was told that his application was still being processed. In September, the office asked him for more information - educational, medical, financial and familial.

In November he sent in copies of his credit card and Social Security card, his driver's license, a water bill and a school report card. In January, the government wanted more, including work records and relatives' contact info. The passport process should take four to six weeks. He's been at it seven months.

So Hudson blew a fuse.

"I said angry things," Hudson admits while we talk in the wood-paneled living room of his house on a quiet, hilltop street in Pottstown, where he lives alone. A bicycle is at one end of the living room, a big flat-screen TV at the other.

The snow on the ground is no less white than his bushy beard, which he says plays a role in his problem.

"It looks like I'm Iranian. My hair is long," he says, claiming that he was profiled and then launching into a soft-spoken, focused rant.

"You gave Louis Farrakhan a passport. You gave Malcolm X a passport," he remembers telling the passport office. "I'm not like a guy from out of the country to fly airplanes. You allowed them in here, not me. Now you're blaming me, because of my looks."

It didn't stop there.

"You gave Obama a passport - and his father wasn't a citizen."

I think a red flag went up when he mentioned the president. Red flags were added when, over the phone and in writing, he dropped cluster F-bombs. Using obscenities didn't help his case.

Does he regret it now?

"No regrets, no remorse. It's not trouble to me," he says, even though it is.

"I don't mind kissing your ass if I have to," he says, "but if I have to kiss your front, we have a problem."

He believes the government is out to get him because he's black, but when I remind him that he has numerous black relatives who easily got passports, he pivots a bit.

"I speak up," he says. Hudson prizes his pride more than his passport.

He wants to speak with President Obama.

"We can sit down and have a chat, like the beer summit. Or he can come up here to see me."

Obama didn't come, but a guy from the government did.

I ask if Hudson's an angry black man.

"I don't call myself an angry black man, but I see injustice with blacks, immigrants, poor people."

Finally, I get word from the government: "The Department is unable to provide any information specific to Mr. Hudson's case because of the Privacy Act," a State Department official e-mailed me.

Whose privacy? Hudson's talking with the press. Clearly, Hudson's not a go-along-to-get-along guy - and in America he shouldn't have to be. He ought to get either a passport or an explanation.

E-mail stubyko@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5977. See Stu on Facebook. For recent columns: www.philly.com/Byko.