Originally Posted by DuncanB

Hi Everybody,

Apologies in advance if I haven't posted this in the correct area, this seemed to be the best place but I wasn't 100% certain. I had an odd experience passing through US Customs recently whereby I appear to have been red-flagged and wanted to see if anybody else has had had a similar experience and if it turned into an ongoing issue when traveling. I should start off by saying that I am a Canadian citizen and have a NEXUS pass. My wife and I had planned a trip to Hawaii, and she logged in to check in with the airline within the 24 hour window prior to the flight. When doing this, the airline allowed her to check in but she got an error message back for me saying that they needed more information (despite the fact that she had entered my passport number). At the airport (Vancouver, BC), we were able to check in without a problem, but then I was selected for a secondary search consisting of a body scan. Following that minor inconvenience, we continued on to US Customs (at YVR, you clear US Customs in the airport prior to actually leaving Canada). As I have NEXUS, I was able to use the retina scan booth for identification purposes rather than waiting in the usual line. When we reached the US customs officer, he immediately referred both of us to secondary inspection. We waited for awhile at secondary inspection before I was eventually called. The officer asked me a few basic questions (ie my job, where I worked, the location of the company, why I was going to the US, etc.). He then said that they just needed to wait for my checked baggage to come back (apparently it had accidentally been sent on) before I could go. This took awhile, and eventually my wife went up and asked him if he needed anything from her as well or if she was just being brought in because of me. He said that she was just there because of me, and that the reason that I was there was because I had a common name (which is not the case at all, I actually have a very uncommon name and would be shocked if there were 20 people in all of North America with the same first and last names as me). Anyways, eventually our checked bags arrived and we were both called up again. Oddly enough, he put our carry-on bags through the scanner but did not even look at our checked bags. He then gave us our passports back and told us to have a good trip.

Has anybody else experienced something similar? If so, did you continue to get stopped and sent to secondary inspection in future trips across the border? 99% of the time that I enter the US I drive across the border to Washington state, and I'm hoping that this isn't going to happen indefinitely going forward, as it would kind of defeat the purpose of having a NEXUS card in the first place. Otherwise, does anybody know why I potentially could have been stopped in the first place since it didn't appear to be random? Given that I have NEXUS, the US government already has all of my information and I'm surprised that they would need to stop me if they already knew exactly who I was. The whole thing was very odd, especially considering the fact that they didn't even check my bags in the end.

Thanks in advance!