Passport submission during TECO office closures in COVID:
@crs125, yes, I put a notarized copy of my passport, plus the passport notification paper, and a short note, and sent it via USPS priority mail. The passport submission was complicated because the TECO Los Angeles office is closed for physical work due to COVID-19, and I think TECO LA closed in March and didn’t resume mail service for non-emergency cases until May 1, so there was already a backlog of cases. USPS picked up my package June 2, I expect it to arrive June 3, them to look at it and process it sometime by June 17, and then relay the confirmation to the central department and the next stage should be IC card printing and then get the digital resident authorization PDF.
Since each TECO only receives very few gold card applications from overseas, and probably only a few TECOs have received gold card applications while there are shelter-in-place orders, I think it just took a while to get someone at the right department to confirm I could do this (there was one specific person I had to get routed to). They are working quite hard to keep things going though, someone even called me back on Saturday. I was actually going to pre-emptively just mail the notarized copy of the passport last week based on @pin2xbo’s instructions, but was told to wait for confirmation first since they wanted to see if I had to send it to another address. I also called someone at TECO Seattle, who knew about the notarized copy (after all, if I’m going to mail it, it doesn’t really matter which TECO right), because @pin2xbo had submitted that way, but they said I had to submit through TECO LA since I wasn’t in their jurisdiction. The LA office is quite busy now, but if you call and leave a message (ideally during business hours) someone will return your call same-day. Since the health department says stay at home orders will likely stick until the end of August, you may have to mail in your notarized copy too if you are in TECO LA. If you are TECO SF, I also suggest contacting them pre-emptively to just get them familiar with passport submission.
If you are applying through TECO LA though, it should be much faster for you now that they are familiar! There are also stories like some TECO offices not taking FedEx, and the BoJack poster having his (different visa) submission messed up because he chose early morning before-8am UPS delivery, and UPS tried to deliver before 9am and it failed, since TECO Houston was only open there 9am-12pm on Tuesday/Friday back then. Bojack Comes Back. So USPS Priority Mail is probably safest
^I basically followed that instruction