Is it safe to travel with a green card nowadays?
Another rule of thumb is to make sure that the overseas travel does not exceed six months
Daily TribuneAnother rule of thumb is to make sure that the overseas travel does not exceed six months
Not surprisingly, and on account of the filthy anti-immigration detritus raining down all over the US these days, a few clients with green cards thought it prudent to seek advice from this corner before jetting off overseas for their spring or summer getaway.
A Filipino couple is planning to travel to the Philippines for the Holy Week. Another client is itching to fly to Europe next month, while another looks forward to spending a summer weekend on a Puerto Rican beach.
(Okay, Puerto Rico is, in a geographical sense, a US territory and therefore no border travel is implicated. However, since the client took the trouble of calling the office for advice, she was told that a valid US driver’s license would suffice, although it would be wise to carry her green card as well, knowing how messed up America’s federal system is right now.)
Digressing aside, the first rule of thumb is to make sure that the green card is still valid and will not expire prior to the inbound entry.
Although a card’s expiration date does not and will not in itself affect one’s US permanent resident status, traveling with an expired green card is like putting oneself on the US Custom and Border Protection’s (CBP) secondary inspection crosshairs, potentially causing an “interrogation” delay at the port of entry (PoE) which can piss off one’s pick-up buddy.
Another rule of thumb is to make sure that the overseas travel does not exceed six months.
Ordinarily, being away from the US for a year or more is considered the acceptable legal threshold before the green card “abandonment” doctrine is supposed to kick in.
However, given the “tighten the border” edict emanating from the White House at present, it isn’t out of the realm of possibility that everyone who’s been away for more than six months will face intense “grilling” at the PoE upon return.
In fact, those unlucky enough to be absent for more than one year without carrying a reentry permit run the risk of being compelled to sign an abandonment form and turned away.
The third rule of thumb is to make sure one has not been convicted of a crime in the interim, even a misdemeanor offense, and definitely not for a serious felony, before getting on an outbound plane.
Otherwise, the return entry would be like passing through the proverbial eye of a needle, with a court-sanctioned deportation the potential endpoint of the journey.
Finally, it is not advisable to embark on a foreign travel if one’s green card is “conditional,” meaning the person’s “resident” status is not yet permanent.
Usually, this occurs when a foreigner obtains a green card through marriage to a US citizen.
Because removal of the “conditional resident” (CR) status requires additional proofs of the marriage’s legitimacy and generally takes years to be approved, some people are forced to travel with an expired CR card along with a notice of the pending CR removal application.
Unfortunately, and based on real-life stories circulating online, this seems to carry a higher risk vis-à-vis the other green card-based sojourns.
Consequently, if foreign travel is unavoidable, it is wise to bring along additional evidence of the marriage’s bona fide status just in case.