Hi everyone! First-time poster, long-time Redditor with a new account!

My partner and her son are from Latin America. My partner immigrated to the US back in 2017 and was able to bring her son 2 years later in 2019. Recently, my partner became a naturalized US Citizen. Hoping this would also apply to her son, she went to a post office to fill out and order her US passport. At the post office, they told her that she needed the father's consent to give her custody in order to be able to apply for a passport for her son. The son's biological dad isn't exactly a good person, and when my mother-in-law asked him if he would kindly surrender custody to my partner so that her son could become a citizen, he refused.

My partner and my question would be: what can we do to go around this? In a legal and immigration sense, my partner's son is still a permanent resident until his green card expires in about two years. My partner and I assumed that with her son being able to leave their home country and become a US permanent resident she would have already had legal custody of her son in the US. The father signed and notarized a document saying that my partner had permission to take their son out of their country and into the US.

Contact between my partner and the biological dad is really scarce. She and my in-laws aren't even aware of his whereabouts most of the time.