Which airport has nice officers?

B

bennydepp

New Member
Being out of country for couple of months I am now planning on buying a plane ticket back to States.

My home is close to Los Angeles, so it makes sense to fly straight there. But I have heard that LAX has the worst immigration officers and myself I had a great experience with officers at JFK.

Just for that reason I am deliberating flying first to JFK and then to LAX from there.

Do you feel that some of the airports are nicer to LPRs and some less?
 
I am worried because I heard rumors from some people returning after 7-14 days vacation being given a hard time ...

In addition to that my lease is up, so I am technically a homeless and I have to find a new place to live when I come back.
 
Stop worrying! You're not returning past 6 months, and you have every right to be at the end of your lease. They're not going to ask you about that (unless you've been abroad for possible nefarious purposes). Where are you right now? Which places have you visited?

Anyway, it doesn't only depend on the POE - any individual officer could be a douche. Really. Stop worrying. LAX is a problem-free POE.
 
I am now in Russia (my country of origin) and I also traveled to Belarus and Poland.

I am feeling better about the POE now. Could the thing with the lease come up during naturalization interview?

I very appreciate your input cafeconleche!
 
When you apply for US citizenship (N-400 and naturalization interview) you will need to disclose your absences from the USA. Of course you will want to be honest and they will likely have an electronic record of your absences anyways.

If the only significant absence is a period of 2 months which happens to straddle the expiration of an old lease and your therefore needing a new place with a new lease, I don't expect that to be a problem and I don't expect them to ask to see the lease. If you have a lot of absences--not just this one--and it begins to look like you may not really be living in the US--then they may start to have more questions. In that case showing copies of past lease records which can verify continuous residence can be very important.

A single 2 month absence over the 60 month period before applying is nothing--assuming the other 58 months are spent in the US--not even worth worrying about. But if you aren't really living in the US and are really living in Russia--if the pattern is spend 2 months in Russia, a few days in the US, then repeat--then eventually they'll figure that out.
 
CalGreenCard: thank you for the reply

Unfortunately, the 2 months is not the only absence of mine. In fact over the 60 month period before applying I will have accrued 34 months of physical residence inside and about 26 months absence outside the U.S.

 
AFAIK the lease will only come up if there are already other questions or concerns about your residency in the US. The 2 month trip by itself is not a big deal. The question both at the border and in naturalization will be whether there was ever an extended period when you spent very little time in the US and thereby broke continuous residency.

34 months definitely exceeds the minimum 30 months physical presence required to potentially be able to get US citizenship. But it does imply that there have been significant periods of absence. Both at the border and in naturalization, if there have been any especially long periods of absence it could become an issue. 2 months out is not a problem. 11 months out, then a week back in, followed by 2 months out will raise a red flag. If the 26 months out is broken up into a lot of small pieces interspersed between long periods spent stateside you should be OK. If the 26 months was all at once--or almost all at once--that could be an issue both at the border and in naturalization.

To answer your original question, I have in fact found the LAX officers to be more surly than most and would agree with your instincts to enter at a different airport. However I was not dealing with your specific situation: I'm just offering a single data point FWIW that I've found the LAX officers to be harder to deal with than elsewhere.
 
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