qilipu
New Member
I was planning to go to Buffalo to renew my TN-1 status, which is about to expire, but found out that I may need to fly overseas due to some urgent family business. Would it be possible to do renewal (or getting new status, if the old expires already) when flying back into the US from overseas (not from Canada), e.g. at JFK, PHL, ORD etc? The policy (see below) does not prohibit that, but I wonder if anybody has a recent first-hand experience with such a situation.
I remember trying to do a renewal at JFK once, several years ago, and the CBP staff there did not want to bother, motivating their refusal to adjudicate by the fact that I still had several months left on the old TN-1, and "why don't you renew it by mail?" (Which I would do, but my employer, amazingly, has a written policy against mail-in renewal for TN-1). I asked them what would happen if I only had a few weeks left on the old TN, and got a rather non-committal response along the lines of, "well, we'd talk about it".
These days, of course, the CBP prefers to do all TN-1 processing at several "designated" ports of entry (see the document "Traveling on a TN or L1 Visa from Canada?"
on the CBP site; for some reason, I cannot post a link). While they say that you can still go to any Class A POE, in practice, I understand, the staff at a non-designated land entry point (or even a designated POE outside of the business hours) would ask you to go to a designated POE instead.
I remember trying to do a renewal at JFK once, several years ago, and the CBP staff there did not want to bother, motivating their refusal to adjudicate by the fact that I still had several months left on the old TN-1, and "why don't you renew it by mail?" (Which I would do, but my employer, amazingly, has a written policy against mail-in renewal for TN-1). I asked them what would happen if I only had a few weeks left on the old TN, and got a rather non-committal response along the lines of, "well, we'd talk about it".
These days, of course, the CBP prefers to do all TN-1 processing at several "designated" ports of entry (see the document "Traveling on a TN or L1 Visa from Canada?"
on the CBP site; for some reason, I cannot post a link). While they say that you can still go to any Class A POE, in practice, I understand, the staff at a non-designated land entry point (or even a designated POE outside of the business hours) would ask you to go to a designated POE instead.
