Interview with an Umpire

We have entered the summer wedding season. This has brought Alrica and I back to the US to attend two weddings. One of them is today and the other in early July. We are only back in the states for a bit, but even the travel back was an adventure.

Knowing we would be frequently travelers, Alrica and I applied for the Global Entry Program. It is a program that, if you are approved, means much faster entry through passport control and customs when you arrive in the United States. It also includes TSA precheck, so even though air travel within the US would be infrequent, it would still be helpful.

We applied in April 2024, and the way the process works is first someone reviews your application and you get conditional approval. But that isn't complete approval. For complete approval, you need to have an interview with a Customs and Border Patrol agent at an international airport (and one of the bigger ones.)

About two days after we applied, Alrica got an email telling her she had a status change. When she checked on the CBP site, she was conditionally approved. Hooray! All she had left was to get an appointment. But we were going to have to travel to a large enough airport to do so, so Alrica decided to wait until I was approved.

We waited. And we waited. Frequently, Alrica would tell me to double check I hadn't just missed an email from the CBP. Sometimes she made me log into the CBP website to check if I had a notification. But I hadn't missed an email, and there was no notification.

Then in September 2024, we left the country. We weren't going to be at any airport with a CBP agent for a long time. It was only then (and even not right away but in November) that I was finally conditionally approved.

Why did it take Alrica two days and it took me several months? We don't know. Nothing tells you anything of that sort in the CBP notification process. I guess Alrica is a clean cut, good old American citizen, and I am a man of international infamy. Just a guess, of course.

This past Thursday, we flew from San Jose, Costa Rica to Fort Lauderdale, Florida (USA). That was only the first leg of our journey, but it was the one where we had to go through passport control. And the CBP offers interviews on arrival at most large international airports, including Fort Lauderdale. So after we got our entry into the country approved, we moved to the area where you could have interviews and sat to wait.

Here, something unexpected happened. Alrica was called up first. The man interviewing her had so many questions. Why did you wait from April 2024 until June 2025 to do the interview? Why did you enter Montenegro but never leave Montenegro? (Though her presence in Fort Lauderdale clearly indicated that she must have left Montenegro, even if Montenegro never indicated that in the passport system.) And perhaps most difficult, he asked Alrica to list all the countries she has visited in the last five years, from the most recent working backwards. If you've only been to one or two countries in that time, this is probably easy. But when you've been to twenty some countries in the last five years, it isn't even easy to do that in forward order. Harder in backward order.

He growled when she missed a country (like Canada). He growled when she mentioned a country that wasn't on his list (like Belgium, because in much of Europe, there is no border control between countries. So once you enter the Schengen region, you can travel from country to country without getting your passport scanned.) He growled when she didn't include Colombia, even though that was eight years ago, not five years ago. His comment was "close enough to five." (As a mathematician, I object to 8 being included in less than or equal to 5.)

Alrica's interview took about 30 minutes to complete. In the meantime, about halfway through her interview, I was called up to another agent. He asked me if this was my only passport, if the address on my driver's license was still valid, and if I was still an online professor for Johns Hopkins. Then he took my picture and I was approved. In and out in less than five minutes.

So maybe I am the fine upstanding citizen and Alrica is the one with some multinational intrigue that I should like to know about.

Not to keep you in suspense, we were both approved. (Eventually in the case of one of us.)