Originally Posted by
elc2414
You've been very fortunate on your re-entry experiences. What airports are you flying in to? What kind of plane? All my international trips except for one have been on wide body jets with hundreds of people on board into major gateways like LAX, DFW, ORD, JFK, BOS - no way are you getting through border control in 5 minutes even if you are sitting in the front of the plane. My average entry time is 20 - 30 minutes even with mobile passport.
On TPAC flights and TATL (big planes -- mostly 777s or 380s, definitely hundreds of people on board): Usually SFO. SEA once.
From Mexico and Central America (narrowbodies): DFW once, SFO a few times. DFW was a strange one -- I was connecting through to SFO and all the time was really just to wait for my bags so I could carry them through and re-check them. Everything else was super quick. My understanding is that now you don't even have to pick up your bags in DFW in that situation any more?
My one long wait was on a 777 coming back to SFO from HKG, about 3 weeks ago (during the shutdown), when they had 2 or 3 agents working in the "citizens" line. Even then, "long" was only 30 minutes -- it really wasn't that bad. Every other time, it's taken me longer to fight with the kiosk (I can never get that thing to work for some reason) than to get through the line after the kiosk.
I found that when they opened the kiosks to all citizens and permanent residents a few years ago, the lines got a lot shorter.
EDIT: There is now an alert on the sign-in page
The extended partial government shutdown has resulted in a substantial backlog of CBP's Trusted Traveler Programs (TTP) applications and renewals.
Applicants for Global Entry (GE), SENTRI, NEXUS and FAST should expect significant delays in application processing times and limited appointment availability at TTP enrollment centers.
Conditionally approved GE members should seek to complete their GE interviews without an appointment upon arrival from an international flight at any of the 49 airports participating in CBP's Enrollment on Arrival (EoA) program.