# Bureau of Consular Affairs

> The Bureau of Consular Affairs (CA) is the bureau of the U.S. Department of State responsible for
> consular services: passports, visas, intercountry adoption, and travel advisories for every country
> in the world. It publishes no developer program and no API documentation of its own, but three real
> machine-readable surfaces are public and callable without a key: a CKAN open-data catalog, a set of
> ArcGIS Online Feature Services, and an RSS feed of travel advisories.
>
> Generated by API Evangelist from the artifacts in this repository. Not published by the bureau.
> Provenance: generated 2026-09-05, method generated, source apis.yml + repo artifacts.

## Read this first

- HTTP status codes lie on this provider. Both CKAN and ArcGIS return `200 OK` on failure and put the
  error in the response body (`success: false` / `error.code`). Branch on the body.
- Only three operations require a credential (dataset create/update/delete on the CKAN catalog).
  Everything else is anonymous.
- `cadatacatalog.state.gov` and `travel.state.gov` sit behind a Cloudflare WAF that blocks many
  automated clients outright with a 403 "Sorry, you have been blocked" page. The ArcGIS services and
  the `/_res/rss/` feed paths are not affected.

## APIs

- [CA Data Catalog (CKAN Action API)](https://cadatacatalog.state.gov/api/3/action): passport
  issuance statistics, visa data, adoption statistics and other consular datasets. Standard CKAN.
- [Travel Advisory Levels (ArcGIS Feature Service)](https://services6.arcgis.com/R6wlO6UHmSzqm9Vs/arcgis/rest/services/Travel_Advisory_Levels__(2024)_View_Layer/FeatureServer/54):
  one polygon per country carrying the current Level 1-4 advisory, its ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 code, the
  advisory date and the URL of the human advisory page.
- [Embassy and Consulate Locations (ArcGIS Feature Service)](https://services6.arcgis.com/R6wlO6UHmSzqm9Vs/arcgis/rest/services/Embassy_and_Consulate_Locations_View_Layer/FeatureServer/0):
  every U.S. post, with address, phone, emergency phone, email, and the post that provides consular
  services for the location.
- [Intercountry Adoption Statistics (ArcGIS Feature Services)](https://services6.arcgis.com/R6wlO6UHmSzqm9Vs/arcgis/rest/services/All_Years_Adoption_Statistics/FeatureServer):
  adoption counts, published as one service per year from 1999 plus all-years rollups.
- [Travel Advisories RSS](https://travel.state.gov/_res/rss/TAsTWs.xml): 216 dated items, each naming
  what changed in that advisory. The nearest thing the bureau publishes to a change feed.

## Specs and artifacts

- [Discovery API OpenAPI](openapi/bureau-of-consular-affairs-discovery-api-openapi.yml) — 13 read operations
- [Datastore API OpenAPI](openapi/bureau-of-consular-affairs-datastore-api-openapi.yml) — 2 query operations
- [Write API OpenAPI](openapi/bureau-of-consular-affairs-write-api-openapi.yml) — 3 token-gated operations
- [ArcGIS service descriptors](openapi/) — the five Feature Services, saved verbatim as fetched
- [Authentication](authentication/bureau-of-consular-affairs-authentication.yml)
- [Conventions, reversibility and idempotency](conventions/bureau-of-consular-affairs-conventions.yml)
- [Error catalog](errors/bureau-of-consular-affairs-problem-types.yml)
- [Data model](data-model/bureau-of-consular-affairs-data-model.yml)
- [Conformance](conformance/bureau-of-consular-affairs-conformance.yml)
- [Lifecycle](lifecycle/bureau-of-consular-affairs-lifecycle.yml)
- [Rate limits](rate-limits/bureau-of-consular-affairs-rate-limits.yml)
- [Plans and pricing](plans/bureau-of-consular-affairs-plans-pricing.yml)
- [Agent skills](skills/_index.yml)
- [MCP candidate manifest](mcp/bureau-of-consular-affairs-mcp.yml)
- [Well-known probe](well-known/bureau-of-consular-affairs-well-known.yml)
- [Vulnerability disclosure](security/bureau-of-consular-affairs-vulnerability-disclosure.yml)

## Docs

- [Travel Advisories](https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/traveladvisories.html)
- [CA Data Catalog](https://cadatacatalog.state.gov/)
- [Visa Statistics](https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/visa-statistics.html)
- [CKAN Action API reference (the upstream platform)](https://docs.ckan.org/en/latest/api/index.html)
- [Department of State Vulnerability Disclosure Policy](https://www.state.gov/bureau-of-diplomatic-technology/vulnerability-disclosure-policy)

## Not available

- No MCP server, no A2A agent card, no llms.txt, no security.txt, no OpenAPI published by the bureau.
- No SDKs, no CLI, no sandbox, no status page, no deprecation policy, no SLA, no pricing (the data is
  free U.S. Government work).