caveat about traveling on Advance Parole

[Lorenzoid 12]

Just a caveat for people traveling on Advance Parole. If you are using a roundtrip ticket that originates in the U.S., you might raise some eyebrows when trying to board your return flight to the U.S. using the second half of the ticket. My wife was briefly detained by security officials while leaving the foreign country. The security officials had never heard of AP. From their perspective, a foreign resident wanted to board a flight to the U.S. on a one-way ticket, which is a warning flag to security screeners these days. Of course, it was neither a one-way ticket--it was the return portion of a roundtrip--nor was she an ordinary nonresident, since her official status is "adjusting status" and was granted AP. The security officials in the foreign country had to call U.S. authorities to ask what this AP thing was that my wife was trying to explain. It all got sorted out quickly, but I just thought I'd post an account of her experience traveling on AP here. If you're traveling to some area of the world where communication may not be as swift or the officials as motivated in getting to the bottom of the issue, you could have a minor problem.

[Brother Hesekiel 2,236]

What you had is just an unusual experience, nothing else. People travel on AP without problems all the time.

[TBoneTX 45,361]

Just a caveat for people traveling on Advance Parole. [...]

Thanks for posting this. The situation may be uncommon to the point of being very rare, but every bit of awareness helps, si man.

[Lorenzoid 12]

Yes, it has been rare in the past, but I think that with recent air security incidents everything that is out of the norm is raising caution flags lately. As she prepared to exit Belgium to return to the U.S., the immigration official wanted to see that she either had a roundtrip ticket to return to Belgium or that she was a legal resident of the U.S. Since neither applied, it raised a caution flag. She showed them her AP paper, but they didn't immediately know what that was, so they had to phone an American official to confirm that it was okay for her to travel to the U.S. It was only a ten-minute delay, but still worth noting.

But there's more. Upon returning to the U.S., the CBP at the Atlanta airport took over TWO HOURS to process her through Secondary Inspection. (Anyone traveling on AP gets routed into Secondary?) The officials told her that the CBP computer was having problems, so a long queue of people who had been routed to Secondary started building while the computer problem was being resolved. When it was finally her turn, it only took a few minutes, of course. They looked at both of the two AP copies, stamped one, and returned them both to her, and that was that. She said they were quite rude, too, especially with others in the queue who didn't speak good English and were having difficulty understanding. Over two hours after her plane landed I picked her up at the airport. I can't wait until that Green Card arrives. And after that, I can't wait for her citizenship, so that she is no longer treated like garbage by CBP officers.

[TBoneTX 45,361]

I can't wait for her citizenship, so that she is no longer treated like garbage by CBP officers.

USCs can be treated that way, too. Some of these agents think that the U.S. is their country more than it is ours.