FabtheFab
Difficulty:  | Review Topic: Port of Entry Review
I did my POE at Dallas (DFW) with my daughter. It was incredibly smooth - it took me 30 minutes from the moment I left the plane to doing all immigration part and getting my bags and meeting my husband outside. We were worried about eventually missing a connection because of waiting for the visas to be processed, so he decided to pick us up at Dallas and driving to Oklahoma from there.
But it was a matter of luck, I think - my flight landed 30 minutes before expected, and I think we were the first flight to arrive on that day. It was 4:30 am. From there, I rushed with my daughter to avoid huge lines - we went through the usual "Non-US citizens with a visa" line that we would use before for visiting. It took us some 10 minutes of waiting there.
The first CBP officer was very nice and friendly. When I told him we were immigrating and showed him the envelopes he said "Oh, this is different. I like this!" - I did fingerprints then and he asked us to follow him to the secondary office. We got there at around 5:00 am. We sat down. There were two people already waiting there - they looked pretty stressed out - I am assuming they were trying to come with visitor visas and were sent to secondary. The CBP officer put my envelopes in a queue. The person who was processing it called the two people before me in order, and then called me and my daughter. We probably waited 10 minutes there.
He showed our newly stamped visas in our passports and said "This will be your temporary resident proof before the card arrives to your address". And that was all. He looked grumpy (maybe because it was 5 am) so I decided not to make any more questions and left.
We got our luggage, and when we went through customs I told the customs officer in advance we were immigrating (we had 5 huge bags). The custom officer asked if we had food or alcohol and I said no.
Then he said "Welcome to America"! And that was it. I'm very glad.
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Port of Entry Member Review #16053
Entry Date: 2015-12-31