Does the government keep track (meaning do they know when you leave?) of all US citizens leaving the country?
If not do you really have to “check in” with the government aka go through immigrations if you are a US citizen returning or if you had the money could you just fly directly to a domestic airport of your choosing from overseas and land and go your merry way?
If you do have to check in how can the government keep track of every person that has left (and by that I mean find out when they return) and if they go through immigrations? Do they just assume people are still gone if they don’t “check in”?
I don’t know if they “keep track” when you leave. But a US citizen return to the US must certainly go through a check with whatever agency they’re calling INS these days.
Nobody is required to check in with the government when out of the country. All people, including US citizens, are required to go through immigration and customs when returning to the country, with the possible exception of military personnel traveling on orders.
Customs and Border Protection collects information from sea and air travelers electronically. If you fly out of the United States, your name and passport information are on a manifest held by the carrier, which is sent to Customs and Border Protection.
Yes, you must go through immigration when you return to this country. Since the US requires flight plans to be filed to enter this country, the government will know if you fly into a random airport, and generally either be okay with it if the airport has a CBP presence, in some cases send a CBP agent to the airport, or tell you to land elsewhere.
I am not a US Citizen, but the last few times I have left the US (most recently Nov 2014 at JFK) the TSA (not Immigration) person just before the nude scanner took my passport and boarding pass and ran that through some scanner. I noticed they did that with US Citizens as well.
Funny you should ask. I’m an American expat living in China and visiting S. Korea at the moment. With passport checks, the government can know what country I’m in at any given time. And since I use an American credit card, they can also know what hotel I’m staying at, what restaurants I visit. Few hotels take cash, so my money trail isn’t hard to follow… unless I’m in China.
Most Chinese businesses don’t tale Visa or Master Card. They take local Chinese bank cards, which are administered by UnionPay (Huge outside the US, not so big inside it; it’s China-based). I’ve tried using my Chinese and Korean UnionPay cards at American ATMs with mixed success.
I quite imagine that the NSA could track my UnionPay purchases if they were so inclined, but my Bank of America card data is certainly low-hanging fruit for them.
Oh, and I file my tax returns every year, so there’s a form of checking in as well.
Actually, since you are a U.S. person, the U.S. Government would require a warrant to obtain the data on where you use your credit card, etc. the fact that you are overseas is irrelevant to your constitutional rights in this case.
I know someone who has been overseas all summer. He received an invitation (I think via email) from the local US embassy for an Independence Day picnic. So presumably they keep track of Americans in town. (And that might come in handy, if there is a civil disturbance or natural disaster.)
The State Department maintains a system where travelers can register their travel plans, so the embassy can notify you in the case of some calamity, or if somebody stateside needs to track you down. The invitation might have come from that system. It’s unlikely that the embassy would just troll a list of people leaving the country, since they wouldn’t know when or if those people were traveling back to the US, or where they would be on Independence Day.
When I lived in Korea, I got regular (mass) e-mails from the embassy in Seoul, updating all the US citizens of travel hazards, saber rattling from Pyongyang, typhoon alerts, etc.
Yeah, but I specified the NSA, which has a “wink wink” relationship with the necessity of warrants. Korean surveillance of my internet use was a much bigger concern.
Doesn’t CBP always have agents and offices at any airport you could possibly come in by on an international flight? Or are you referring to private flights?
I know that it’s possible to clear customs in Toronto and then fly directly to a US airport without a customs office. So no, they don’t always have agents and offices at every airport with international flights.
Yes, I’m talking about if you want to fly your own plane, or a charter, to some particular airport. Any airport I can imagine with scheduled service would have arrangements already with CBP.
I think the preclearance thing with Canada is exclusively for scheduled airline flights, but I’m sure of of the pilots on the board may have more insight.
According to that DHS website, "operators of small pleasure vessels, arriving in the United States from a foreign port or place to include any vessel which has visited a hovering vessel or received merchandise outside the territorial sea, are required to report their arrival to CBP immediately. . . "
This reminds me of a time when a friend of mine in San Diego, who was learning to sail, rented a sailboat and invited me to join him on an outing out of San Diego Bay one 4th of July holiday. At one point we decided to go to some nearby islands, (the Coronado Islands), which are part of Mexico. We approached a small harbor on one of the islands, which consisted of a small dock but not a single boat. From the dock a dirt path led up to a small cinder-block structure, with a clothesline nearby and a donkey tied to a post. There was a large sign that read, “Armada de Mexico.” We came up to the dock to moor, and as we did, a guy came out of the cement structure and motioned us to go away.
I guess that technically we’d landed in a Mexican port, and according to this DHS website we should have reported our arrival back in San Diego, but that thought hadn’t even occurred to us.
