alanjm663
Difficulty:  | Review Topic: Port of Entry Review
I was traveling with my fiance (now wife) when she came to the US for the first time and we traveled through Fort Lauderdale Florida. We were separated of course when we went though customs as I am a US citizen. The line for my wife was much longer so i waited a long time for her. The area that is used for the customs check is upstairs so once you are through you have to go down the stairs to wait for someone. As I was waiting for a long time, and seeing many passengers from my plane come down the stairs I went back up the stairs when I started to get a little worried. I was immediately met by a female imigrations officer who told me to go back down the stairs and wait. So I said that I hadn't seen my wife come down the stairs and I was wondering if there could possibly be a problem, I just wanted a little info. The female officer was very rude, didn't even try to listen to me or hear what I had to say. She just told me go down the stairs and wait again. Turns out that my wife was called into an office and questioned further. I'm not upset that they called her into the office to review it further, I'm upset because I was unaware that something like that could happen and this horrible women wouldn't even be considerate enough to say something like "sir there's a chance she could have been called into the office for further review, would you please wait for her down the stairs". That's all I was asking for, I didn't want her to specifically go and find out, just wanted some common courtesy.
Then when we were in a line for the officers to check our passports and ask us what we were traveling to the US for, we went up to one officer together and I didn't realize that we couldn't do that. Instead of just asking me to wait my turn he started to speak to me in Spanish because my wife handed him her passport first. He knew well that I was not a spanish speaker but he was humiliating me and my wife in front of everyone be we made the mistake of not coming up one at a time. And then when I said I don't speak Spanish he then told us that he did that because we are only suppose to come up one at a time. Bottom line the Immigration officers in Fort Lauderdale were down right rude and mean.
On the other hand the airport staff was very kind and helpful, I needed to call my hotel for a airport pickup and I had had an unfortunate accident with my phone while being in Peru. When I asked a nice gentleman at the information desk he looked up the phone number to our hotel and told me that the airport had free public phones upstairs I could use.
Airport staff very helpful and kind. The immigration officers very rude and mean.
|
Port of Entry Member Review #16134
Entry Date: 2015-11-22