Originally Posted by
RandomNobody
While, yes, you have to do do steps 1, 2, 3, and 5, my point was that #4, if your bag is checked through is not required. I've done it plenty of times. My origin airport checks it all the way to the destination. The bag tag has the final airport on the routing list. After customs, there's a no-human conveyor belt you drop your bag onto, which drops it back into the bag handling system. No need to re-check (if the origin Gate Agent did their job correctly).
And at least for LAX Bradley, there's a low-utilization TSA checkpoint set up for international arrivals (at least for daytime arrivals). It's "on the right" after you enter the greeting area past customs on the arrivals level. As mentioned before, T2-8 are all connected airside. In my experience, the lines are usually quite short compared to the main departures level checkpoints.
Ah thanks. I didn't know and that's very useful!
I do not remember seeing the non-human belt elsewhere. Is that in every terminal which has intl arrivals or only for a specific airline arrivals? In fairness, I mostly travel with hand luggage so the only recent time I rechecked in 2022 after BA arrivals was at MIA and there definitely wasn't a non-human belt. The bags were indeed tagged already, but you still had to queue and give it to grumpy AA agents who would still want to see your passport (despite the bag tags and my having my boarding pass), scan and put back on their belt. The queue was long and with no priority.
The TSA security for international arrivals reentry into airside was the longest I have seen and again had no priority lane. After waiting 5 minutes, I left, exited, and went up to departures though at MIA that was a rather impractical schlep with the main connections from intl arrivals blocked so you had to first go further down to then be able to go up. In fairness, there are probably a lot more intl-intl transfers at MIA than LAX so I'm not surprised if it's less messy in the latter, though I have occasionally had extremely long queues at LAX TBIT in the summer too (though not as nightmarish as the ones I have occasionally had at MIA or JFK)