Originally Posted by
edmundronald
In Valencia people without a passport get to sit in the baggage area and served water. On an international flight into the US they'd get carted off to jail as undocumented immigrants / potential terrorists and have to wait for a few days in detention until consular services wake up and supply them with documentation - and then they'd have to get their credit card company to reissue cards without which they can't get around, and then find their kids wherever the system has put them as they'd have been taken away to a different place. No airline employee would venture to get in the way of Homeland and ICE who would have a field day protecting the nation from invasion.
That's a ludicrous fiction. US DHS have a complete set of procedures for such an event (credit card absence is a different matter).