While I’m not offering legal advice, passengers who were allowed to enter the United States without clearing passport control and customs on a Norse Atlantic flight from Paris to New York should not feel compelled to return to the airport.
Norse Atlantic Immigration Snafu At JFK – Not The Passengers’ Responsibility To Make Right
Someone messed up big. After a Norse Atlantic 787 Dreamliner arrived into New York (JFK) on Tuesday from Paris (CDG), passengers were directed into Terminal 7 rather than to the immigration facility located below the terminal. As a result, passengers simply walked out of the airport without being formally processed into the USA.
The error was soon realized, but it was already too late: passengers were already gone (at least the ones who did not check baggage…).
Norse Atlantic sent out the following email at 9:00 pm to passengers:
This is a reminder that you have to be cleared by immigration when entering the US. You did unfortunately not clear immigration upon arrival into New York JFK last night. Please report back to Terminal 7 at JFK this morning at 0900LT at Row E. It is in your own interest that you are processed by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) of the US Government. If you have any questions, please contact us at support@flynorse.com.
So let me get this straight: passengers were allowed to walk into New York through no fault of their own. Many probably continued to onward destinations. Even so, they were all supposed to return to JFK the following morning?
Um, no. Not going to do it…even if I was staying at the deplorable TWA Hotel on-site.
Perhaps my calculus is different as a US citizen, but what are US officials going to do? Not let you leave? If there’s no record of your stay (being processed into the country), how could that impact future travel to the USA?
I realize most will (and did) return out of an abundance of caution, especially foreign visitors who might not want to put future travel or emigration to the USA at risk, but the premise of the request is still absurd.
And half the point of entrance controls is the customs check: were passengers supposed to drag their bags back to JFK as well for inspection by sniffing dogs and government scanners?
No. Thank. You.
I do wonder about the luggage aspect of this. Wouldn’t the baggage be delivered to a sterile facility since US customs typically comes after claiming your bags? Was the luggage also sent to domestic arrivals? Or was it only the passengers who did not check bags who got away without going through passport control?
CONCLUSION
Passengers arriving into New York from Paris on Norse Atlantic were allowed to leave the airport without passing through immigration and customs processing. Hours later, Norse sent an email to those passengers, putting the onus on them to come back the following morning to JFK.
There’s no denying this was a huge-mistake and while Norse Atlantic ground handling agents were likely the ones who opened the wrong door(s), it is ultimately up to the US government to protect its borders, not the low-wage ground handlers of a budget airline.
If I were a passenger on that flight, I would refuse to come back to JFK. If the US government is concerned, let it come to me. But I realize not all are willing to take that risk.
I was on this flight. What a f*ck-up
Any additional details you can provide us?
I love how Norse Atlantic’s email strongly implies it was the passenger who intentionally bypassed CBP – “You did unfortunately not clear immigration upon arrival into New York JFK last night” – and the airline is so graciously sending this reminder.
This is really bad advice. While it is the airline’s fault, these passengers have not been properly processed by the USCIS. This may impact the non-US resident’s ability to re-enter the US or affect their ability to immigrate to the US in the future, and the government know who these people are since the passenger records were transmitted by the airline one hour prior to the departure.
100% right!!! Especially since CBP could also count it as an overstay, due to the fact that they came in but gave no written or verbal record as to when they’ll depart the US. This will definitely have some impact on their next visit.
We were told, when we returned to JFK, that CBP would probably not do anything had we not returned, but that a problem might occur in the future should we leave the country.
Can’t warn us before linking to One Mask At a Time? Some of us prefer to get our vaccine and mask info from actual doctors and scientists. Trying to avoid propaganda and dictators. Thanks 😉
I need a vaccine to unsee this comment
Sounds like someone posing as me (wonder who…probably that weirdo who kept calling me Ben from OMAAT). I would never say anything this asinine.
You were the loudest cheerleader and government mouthpiece for masks and vaccines, both of which were dangerous in their own ways especially to kids and young adults. Congrats, you’ve now got lifetime status on Asinine Airlines and enough mRNA spike protein points and miles to last a lifetime, too. You’re lucky (pun or not) that your audience can’t sue you for encouraging and demanding discrimination and for your own disinformation and censorship and suppression of speech. It’s called speech for the asinine.
Hey fellow patriot. We got bigger problems here… Bud Light! I just filled my pickup bed with all the bud light that would fit from my local beer store just so I can pour it out… I might shoot some of it, I dunno. Please tell me you are buying all the bud light you can to do the same. We need to teach these woke companies a lesson by buying all there product and destroying it!
Dude, be man enough to post under the same name and stop accusing me of being Ben from OMAAT. Also, stop being pro-plague lol
..when you’re man enough to admit you influenced many into an unsafe untested mRNA industrial cocktail
How does it feel LOL to really have just lost at life? What a pathetic twat you are. Get a passport and get out of your parents’ basement.
I don’t believe this happened. The only “evidence” I’m aware of is a Reddit post and several blog posts. No media outlets are reporting on this. The poor grammar in the letter, and the the Redditor’s dubious understanding of US airports (I walked right in to baggage claim) make this seem unlikely. You also raise a good point… Did the bags go to domestic baggage claim in T7?
Completely believable to me: all it takes is one (presumably contract) gate agent to open the wrong door, and passengers would do exactly that: walk into the terminal, out past baggage claim, and into the city.
I would guess the baggage went properly to the CBP baggage claim, it’s just the passengers that didn’t. The passenger in the Reddit thread didn’t have luggage, so we don’t know, but my guess is it’s the passengers with luggage that were the first to recognize the problem.
“Aaron” it’s evident that you are actually “Lucky” from “One Booster at a Time.”
Just cop to it so we can all move on.
Sadly it did happen. We returned to JFK, after getting an email from Norse. We were told that in reality we did not have to return at 9am, as the initial email said, but just sometime on Wednesday. We were also told we did not have to bring luggage. CBP told us that had we not returned nothing would have happened, but that we might have an issue during our next international flight. Norse initially said they would not reimburse us for costs to return but then said to save receipts. I also saw something that suggested they would not only reimburse for travel to the airport but might provide a free ticket for use in the future.
Bill, I believe you. It’s definitely a bad situation. I’m just curious why none of this further communication has been shared. All we have seen is a Reddit post followed by hearsay. Hopefully you managed to get everything sorted.
Ben Schlappig is a well-known anti-semite who spent a great portion of the scamdemic casting ridiculous aspersions at the Jewish Orthodox community.
He is also a big promoter of all sorts of other looney-toon leftist drivel. Please don’t link to him.
Did you forget your chill pill?
It’s that guy who posted as LOL in Matthew’s recent article about Disney and DeSantis, posting under a different name now (and also as the Aaron attacking Lucky/OMAAT upthread).
Dave K is someone else. I’m not all aware of the points in his first paragraph but would like to learn more. His second paragraph is obviously true. It’s interesting that once people said don’t link to Ben that we then got linked to Ben without warning. Can’t get away from the leftie leftist.
This performance of yours is just weird. As is your hatred of Ben.
I hate all dictators. Everyone should.
The original Reddit thread on r/flights has some additional information (as well as a second passenger chiming in), including that Norse eventually upped the offer to a free flight and Uber reimbursement to get them to return to the airport for processing.
Norse is probably lucky that they’re a point-to-point international carrier and that therefore it’s much more likely their passengers were in the NYC metro.
First off… I wouldn’t have left! My Global Entry, TSAPre are too valuable to put on the line.
Why do we care about passport control and customs at airports if anyone can walk into the US freely from the Southern border without having to go to any process? Just open up the country to anyone that wants to come and save a lot of money in equipment and personnel.
Darn right! You know what else is really burning me up about this woke country? Bud Light! How dare they support those alphabet people! Don’t they no no libs drink there beer! I just bought all the bud light I could afford and poored it down the drane.
I encourage all the patriots of this country to go to your stores, and instead of buying food for your family, buy all the bud light you can, and throw it away! That will show those libs that make bud light you will go broke if you go woke! Only budweiser for this patriot from now on!
This is not the first time an international flight has landed as a domestic flight and people not processed through Customs and Immigration. What happened in those cases?
They tracked the passengers down and had them come back to the airport…
If in this situation my instincts would be exactly the same as Matthew’s except for the issue of Global Entry. CBP can be super sensitive to their interpretation of non-compliance and I wouldn’t want to risk losing GE.
Had the opposite happen arriving in MIA years ago… the “International” corridor door was open at the end of the jetway with about 20 of us heading through up to the main cattle call hallway toward immigration. We turned around and were luckily let back in, without much trouble, to the “domestic’ door at the jet bridge again with our boarding passes checked.
If I were the airline I’d probably offer a few hundred dollars per passenger that showed up the next morning. That would probably move at least 90% of the paxs.
Mathew….I really enjoy your content & reviews. I find that you are getting increasingly self righteous.
There’s more to the story than meets the eye—has to do with the racism I see in Hawaii, but that’s a whole different issue.
Speaking on this from experience in a prior life where I was an airline station manager and my agents did this (but with a flight from Jamaica… off-schedule extra flight making up for a cancelled flight the prior day, not normal arrival time, agent just screwed up and ran to the gate to meet the flight and didn’t realize where it came from)…
Many of these gates can be dual use domestic or international. Almost all of course have a way to get into the gate area – after all, they are used for boarding too. It’s usually a matter of which door you open to unlock the right pathway. You would think that some doors would be locked out and unable to open if others are opened up, but you then have to put fire egress regulation on that.
In this case that my agent did, the Captain when deplaning questioned why they were being let out into the terminal. Thankfully the ramp was on point and delivered the bags to the claim in customs. So by the time I got there from my office, and had notified CBP, myself and supervisors and some CBP officers managed to corral 90% of the passengers in domestic bag claim as they were waiting for bags. We marched them down to customs and they were processed. Another half dozen or so had not yet left the airport and when we called them they came back inside. A couple others made it home nearby before they got the message or answered the phone and did come back. Customs officers met them curbside in their car to process them.
There were four passengers who had left the metro area before answering and flat refused to return (which I see the author of this article is advocating that position). They were US citizens. Well, the airline and customs has your passport and personal information because it’s collected at booking/check-in. The Port Director for CBP spoke to them and found out where they were (within an hour of another major airport) and basically told them they had 3 hours to report to that port of entry for processing or a federal warrant would be out for their arrest. The way the law is written, it may have been an airline screwup, but it is your duty as a US passport holder to ensure that you legally come and go at the border ultimately.
I had a colleague who managed LAX for a Mexican airline back in the 90s and this happened with a flight from somewhere like Hermosillo where it was not a tourist group. He ended up getting fired even though he was at home asleep that night. CBP never did find at least half of those on the airplane who were not US nationals.
Completely agree, how Matthew can think that they’ll not even be known about us completely incorrect. The airline knows who boarded the plane, check against rolls of those who cleared customs and you have your list. Silly to propose that people avoid the law just because the airline made a mistake.
What difference // At this point // Does it make // ???
Can you please please please do some basic proofreading? Rife with errors. I really like what you write and it kills me to see basic mistakes.
Proofreading from who? Its public commenting.
I’m talking about the actual post. I don’t care about the comments.
Spell checked articles are Patreon for only $5 per day. Support coffee habits. OnlyFans is under consideration for more mud photos. Standby
What’s one plane load when thousands are pouring across the southern border with no repercussions.
I WOULD GO BACK. Just in case they decide to get all the passengers’ names and nationalities. Foreign citizens can be denied entry into the United States on future visits. As a US citizen, you can be blacklisted and be denied Global Entry and programs as such, and it could be a crime.
“If there’s no record of your stay (being processed into the country), how could that impact future travel to the USA?”
Except CBP does have this information, at least in theory, thanks to APIS. Which means there are three very good reasons why you shouldn’t just blow this request off:
1) If you’re a non-US national, you can have your current and future visa waiver eligibility revoked, or your visa canceled outright.
2) If you are a US national and have Global Entry, CBP can revoke your membership for pretty much any reason. You think they won’t revoke you if you refuse a request to report for inspection?
3) Even if you don’t have GE, you will likely be barred from applying in the future, and probably get sent to secondary every time you try to re-enter the country for a long period of time.
So follow your advice at your own peril.
Interesting we have this info for some transport but not the wide open borders
So they know you’re here. Why report back then? So we can bend over for the thugs stamping passports? Let them make a manual entry.
Thugs?
It was years ago now, circa 1997-1998 and I am maybe 200ish folks were accidentally allowed by Tower Air into JFK without passing through passport and customs.
It was a bit hilarious as nobody seemed to notice that we were just allowed to leave the flight without passing through whatever we called CBP back then
I continued on my connecting flight iirc on AA home to Orlando and kept saying how the heck did I completely avoid Immigration and Customs.
About a day and half later, I received a call from Tower instructing me to return to JFK to be stamped into the country.
I explained to the Tower Air employee that I was back home in Florida and could not return to JFK. He didn’t know what to say at the point, provided me a number to Immigration at JFK and suggested I contact Immigration directly which I did.
The guy on the phone knew about the situation and at first said I should return to JFK as that was my point of entry, but after explaining that I was back home in Florida, he said that he would have to check with his supervisor and get back to me.
He called me back about two hours later instructing me to go to MCO and speak with Immigration there.
I eventually found an Immigration Office and the employee manning it didn’t know what to say and after calling a bunch of people, said to me, that is for being honest, you can go home.
So this day I have no idea if in some computer somewhere there is some sort of mark against me, but I have traveled internationally many many times and nobody has said a word about it.
You and I both know, CBP is the most arbitrary and capricious of the federal agencies, and the courts have affirmed multiple times that they can do pretty much whatever they want with you in the name of “border inspections”, along with denying entry to non-US nationals for any reason, and you have no recourse. (I’m not touching the situation at the southern border, but it proves my point about arbitrary and capricious.)
Sure, they could just make a manual entry, and maybe your case ends up with an officer that decides to exercise common sense. You really willing to risk it, though?
Thugs? Learn some respect. In the words of Betty White, “Don’t make me call your mother!”
They are thugs. Nosy, stupid, lazy people who gravitate toward those jobs because of deeply-rooted emotional imbalances or size issues they are looking to compensate for. I have utter contempt for the rude and nasty ways I have been treated by these goons when returning to my own country.
Would you describe most US law enforcement the same way? Just looking for context on whether your concern is generally about how US law enforcement engages with people or specific to border patrol.
I have great respect for law enforcement in general and chuckle at how all the defund the police movements have failed. Yes, there are too many bad apples (because one bad apple is one too many), but overall I have respect for law enforcement personnel and appreciate that when I call them, they come sirens blaring. That said, I despise racist cops and find the militarization of the police deeply disturbing. I also think some cops have the same deficiencies that these retrograde goons at the border have. But my ire is particularly reserved for DHS – for the way they screwed my wife when getting her green card, for the way they have treated me like a criminal over the years for visiting “axis of evil” nations, and for the way they hassle foreign visitors to the USA in a way in which other civilized countries do not do.
Very sorry to hear about the treatment of you and your wife. I wonder when the vaccine mandate will end for travel here. Long overdue. Agree with respect and props for law enforcement in general, but also with militarization and racist bad apples. I think the militarization stems from the police perhaps being pawns, too >> https://imgur.com/a/TtJu9CI
I was on this Norse flight and reported back to CBP for exactly the reason mentioned above–I didn’t wish to jeopardize my Global Entry status.
I agree with your analysis. It is not fair to expect passengers to return to JFK after they were allowed to leave without immigration and customs processing. It was not their fault that someone messed up big. They should not be penalized for the incompetence of the airport staff or the airline. I wonder how this will affect their future travel plans and if they will face any consequences from the US authorities. This is a serious security breach that should not happen again. Norse Atlantic should take responsibility for this snafu and apologize to their customers.
Agree w/most of your points but unclear about ‘serious security breach’ considering the wide-open state of our borders year over year. If someone was that much of a threat, they’d be on the no fly list already.
How could anyone possibly be in trouble for non-compliance? Is it a legal requirement to check your e-mail after a flight?
While it may not seem important to you as a U.S. Citizen, foreigners are in big trouble if they don’t comply since they essentially entered the country illegally, even if it wasn’t their fault. They are being given the opportunity to fix that.
By the way, it isn’t true that they have no record of who was on that flight. Before a flight departs to the US, the airline sends information about the passengers to CBP, including full name, nationality, passport number, visa number if applicable and the address where you’ll be staying in the US.
I think even citizens should comply if they can, otherwise next time they enter the country they will most likely be questioned about avoiding inspection and CBP questioning can be very long.