Montgomery AL N-400 Oath Ceremony Experience

[RedCoatTD 3]

My oath ceremony was scheduled for 9:30am. The appointment letter gave no indication of how early we should arrive, so my girlfriend, Sarah, and I got there just before 9am. The security check-in was straight-forward, just as it had been for the interview, but the line was snaking all the way out the front door due to the number of people attending the ceremony.

 

After security, I was directed to the large room on the left, while my girlfriend was asked to wait in the waiting area. There were about 6 or 7 9-seat rows in the room I was in. Gradually, the room started to fill up, so there must have been about 60 or so applicants for that session. 9:30am came and went, and I was keeping in tough with Sarah via Facebook's messenger. She told me the waiting room seats were all taken, and I recalled there were about 50 or 60 seats out there.

 

Eventually, a supervisor emerged and told 2 couples their children would have to wait outside the room, as the seats were only for the applicants. The kids were only 6 or 7, so this struck me as quite harsh, especially in light of the recent immigrant child separation scandal in the news. Luckily, the 2 boys got on well and kept themselves occupied the whole time, but I could easily see this not going so well, especially seeing as both boys were out of the line of sight of their parents.

 

We discovered a number of applicants had received letters without a questionnaire printed on the reverse side. An assistant went and printed some pages for those who'd experienced this. We were told that the part of the letter where you sign and date, the location should be the city and state of the center at which you attend the oath ceremony. This wasn't clear on the instructions printed on the letter, so several of us had to cross out what we'd entered and re-write that field. (It's definitely worth taking a pen into the ceremony with you.)

 

The supervisor moved on with things and let us all know what to expect. We were given a packet which included a small US flag, pocket constitution, and various documents and pamphlets for voter registration, passport application etc. There was also some drama between the supervisor and the assistant, which helped relieve some of the boredom of waiting.

 

Next, the supervisor had us "check-in", which involved taking in our letters and green cards after checking that all was in order. With only the supervisor doing this one person at a time, it seemed to take forever. And only at this point did someone realize an older gentleman had showed up at the 9:30am ceremony with a letter for the 1pm ceremony. (Luckily they let him take part in our one, but I could easily have seen this going the other way.) The whole process seemed very inefficient. A lot of "hurry-up-and-wait". 

 

Finally, at around 11:20am the check-in process was complete. The family and friends were packed into our room. The supervisor snapped at a child who'd pulled up a seat next to the parents he'd been separated from for 2 hours, and she told him to go wait at the back of the room. I was fuming. And at this point I realized no-one had instructed us on religious/non-religious options for the pledge of allegiance. The supervisor just had us en-masse, repeating after her as we renounced our allegiance to other countries/princes etc and swearing under god. (I'm non-religious so I just didn't say the god stuff, but it would have been nice if there'd been some prep on that during the 2 hours we were stuck there.)

 

We were presented with our certificates and that was it. Some stopped to take pictures in front of the large flag display at the exit, but I was not one of them. It hadn't been a great experience for me. The wait time seemed unnecessarily long, and I felt bad for the parents whose children had been sent away and snapped at. 

Montgomery's painfully inefficient oath ceremony process stood in stark contrast to the speed and efficiency of the interview I'd had at this location just a few weeks before. I think with some simple changes and the addition of some compassion, this could have been the exciting and special occasion it was meant to be.

[Russ&Caro 1,548]

Congratulations! And thank you for the review and your honesty. My wife is in the final stretch so it'll be interesting to compare your experience in Montgomery to hers in Albuquerque. I wonder if Alabama being in the bible belt was the reason for glossing over the non-religious option.